Exploiting multi-core and many-core architectures for efficient simulation of biologically realistic models of Golgi cells

Abstract Realistic neuronal activity simulation is of central importance for neuroscientists. These simulations allow to test new drugs, to study cerebral pathologies and to discover innovative therapies undertaking in silico experiments instead of in vivo ones. However, the processing times needed to simulate these models are very long. Therefore, high performance computing technologies should be explored in order to provide faster simulations. In this work, authors described high performant and realistic simulations of Golgi cells activity, based on the multi-core and the many-core approaches. Thus, simulations are performed on multi-core Intel processors and on NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units. Moreover, authors addresses the issue of portability among heterogeneous devices by proposing a solution based on OpenCL paradigm. The obtained results show that the considered parallel technologies, in particular the GPUs, are suitable for that kind of simulations and significantly reduce processing times.