Lenovo taps the mystery of the mind

Scientists at the largest research centre in Germany – Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) – are actively trying to figure out the answer to one of biology’s greatest mysteries — how does the human brain create consciousness? These scientists are working with partner institutions as part of the European Human Brain Project to model different scales of the human brain and gain greater insight into how it works.

A research project of this nature requires serious computing power and generates an enormous amount of data that is shared among the partner institutions. JSC needed to store all of this data, provide accessibility at all times and, if necessary, rebuild it quickly. Reliability was also a top concern. To address these storage concerns, they chose Lenovo. JSC installed 22 Lenovo Distributed Storage Solution for IBM Spectrum Scale DSS-G240 and DSS-G260 building blocks. With the improvements in system performance provided by this solution, bandwidth has more than doubled and the storage capacity has increased from 20.3 PB to more than 80 PB which is nearly a 300% improvement.

The new storage at JSC also houses critical data from other research projects, in areas as diverse as neuroscience, fundamental physics, life sciences, climate change and energy. And, the solution will scale to support new queries that scientists have not yet imagined. Stephan Graf, a storage expert at JSC, is confident they will be able to meet the demand, “Because it is so easy to add more building blocks to the cluster, we are well equipped to handle growing data volumes – now and in the future.”

Scientists will be able to run data simulations and access the results faster. They will be able to perform experiments that were not previously possible because of capacity and bandwidth constraints.

Graf is excited about what the new storage solution means for research in all fields that JSC’s high performance computing centre supports, “Not only does it mean we can meet growing demand, it means that scientists will be able to access data much faster, accelerating ground-breaking research.”

As for the European Human Brain Project researchers specifically, all of this adds up to a better understanding of how our brains work, and in turn, could lead to improvements and breakthroughs in brain-related medical treatments.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.