Performance Comparison for Neuroscience Application Benchmarks

Researchers within the Human Brain Project and related projects have in the last couple of years expanded their needs for high-performance computing infrastructures. The needs arise from a diverse set of science challenges that range from large-scale simulations of brain models to processing of extreme-scale experimental data sets. The ICEI project, which is in the process of creating a distributed infrastructure optimised for brain research, started to build-up a set of benchmarks that reflect the diversity of applications in this field. In this paper we analyse the performance of some selected benchmarks on an IBM POWER8 and Intel Skylake based systems with and without GPUs.