High performant simulations of cerebellar Golgi cells activity

The use of High Performance Computing (HPC) technologies is gaining interest in the field of neuronal activity simulations. In fact, scientists' main goal is to understand and reproduce cells behavior in a realistic way. This will allow undertaking in silico experiments, instead of in vivo ones, to test new medicines, to study cerebral pathologies and to discover innovative therapies. To this aim, two main requirements are necessary: neurons have to be described by realistic models and their simulation hopefully have to satisfy the real-time constraint. This last property is very hard to accommodate because models used in these works are very heavy from the computational point of view. For this reason, authors decide to exploit Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) technology to simulate the cellular activity of Golgi cells, which constitute the cerebellar cortex. This paper describes an efficient Golgi cell activity simulation performed using NVIDIA GPUs. Results show that simulation times are reduced from 41 hours to about 2 hours when simulating 400'000 different cells.