Regularizing Sparse and Imbalanced Communications for Voxel-based Brain Simulations on Supercomputers

Inter-process communications form a performance bottleneck for large-scale brain simulations. The sparse and imbalanced communication patterns of human brain make it particularly challenging to design a communication system for supporting large-scale brain simulations. In this paper, we tackle the communication challenges posed by large-scale brain simulations with sparse and imbalanced communication patterns. We design a virtual communication topology with a merge and forward algorithm that exploits the sparsity to regularize inter-process communications. To balance the communication loads of different processes, we formulate voxel partition in brain simulations as a k-way graph partition problem and propose a constrained deterministic greedy algorithm to solve the problem effectively. We conducted extensive simulation experiments for evaluating the performance of the proposed communication scheme and found that the proposed method may significantly reduce communication overheads and shorten simulation time for large-scale brain models.