From a post by Michael Feldman :

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory are going to be using the Theta supercomputer to generate a map of all the neural connections in a brain.

According to a news announcement published on the lab’s website, the project will use high-definition imagery of the brain, along with the computational heft of Theta, to produce a comprehensive neural map, known as a connectome. The work is being done by Doga Gursoy and Bobby Kasthuri, two Argonne scientist who have the just right mix of backgrounds for the job. Gursoy is an assistant computational scientist at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS), while Kasthuri is an Argonne neuroscientist.

“The basic goal is simple — we would like to be able to image all of the neurons in the brain — but the datasets from X-rays and electron microscopes are extremely large”, said Gursoy. “They are at the tera- and petabyte scales. So we would like to use Theta to build the software and codebase infrastructure in order to analyze that data.”

Image Credit:   Human Connectome Project

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