Auto-tuning for neural simulations on different parallel hardware

Applicant Professor Dr.-Ing. Fred Henrik Hamker
Subject Area Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics
Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology
Term from 2016 to 2022
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313818712
 

Project Description

Biologically-realistic neural simulations pose new challenges to parallel computing because of the dependency between the network activity and the total computation time, the temporal evolution of their internal connectivity and the heterogeneity of the networks. Auto-tuning techniques can help selecting optimizations at various levels (algorithmic, data structures) using code generation. In this project, we will investigate online and offline auto-tuning methods to increase the parallel efficiency of neural simulations on different hardware (shared-memory, distributed or GPU-based systems), focusing particularly on the improvement of performance measurements, the analysis of data structures, distribution of data using graph partitioning, the learning of heuristics to restrict the search space and parameterized code generation at run-time for a particular network. The resulting mechanisms will be integrated in an existing neural simulator.
DFG Programme Research Grants