電気通信大学 大学院情報理工学研究科の山﨑 匡准教授に、コンピューティング業界のトップカンファレンスのSC25で採択された研究内容についてご発表いただきます。

Title: Development of a biophysically detailed neural circuit simulator and its application to whole mouse cortex simulations

Speaker: Tadashi Yamazaki, The University of Electro-Communications

Abstract: Understanding the brain requires linking microscopic biophysical properties (e.g., ion channel dynamics and dendritic morphology) to emergent macroscopic phenomena (e.g., neural oscillations and network dynamics). While biologically detailed models are instrumental for this mechanistic insight, their inherent computational cost is substantial. While conventional simulators like NEURON and Arbor are highly effective for general use, in simulating models at the extreme scale, they could become inefficient. This is primarily in terms of their scalability and optimization to fully leverage modern High-Performance Computing (HPC) architectures.

We introduce Neulite (https://numericalbrain.org/neulite/), a light-weight biophysically detailed neural circuit simulator. It is architecturally defined by two core components: a frontend compliant with the Allen Institute’s Brain Modeling ToolKit (BMTK), and a portable numerical kernel. The frontend facilitates biological plausibility and reproducibility through the utilization of standardized data. The kernel, which can be specifically tuned for different computing architectures, allows us to overcome the limitations of conventional simulators through optimized, domain-specific algorithms.

Neulite has been utilized to successfully execute the Allen Institute’s whole mouse cortex model on the Supercomputer Fugaku. We used the entire Fugaku system to simulate 9 million biologically detailed neurons and 26 billion synapses, demonstrating a significant scale of computation. This work is the result of an international collaboration with the team of Dr. Anton Arkhipov at the Allen Institute, where their comprehensive model met our high-performance simulation technology, with support from key domestic contributors (RIKEN R-CCS, RIST, and Yamaguchi University). Neulite is therefore a valuable tool for achieving data-driven, large-scale modeling and advancing the understanding of how cellular properties influence overall neural circuit function.

The content of this talk has been published in a conference paper [1].

[1] Rin Kuriyama, Kaaya Akira, Laura Green, Beatriz Herrera, Kael Dai, Mari Iura, Gilles Gouaillardet, Asako Terasawa, Taira Kobayashi, Jun Igarashi, Anton Arkhipov, Tadashi Yamazaki (*: equally contributed). Microscopic-Level Mouse Whole Cortex Simulation Composed of 9 Million Biophysical Neurons and 26 Billion Synapses on the Supercomputer Fugaku. in The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC ’25), November 16–21, 2025, St Louis, MO, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages. doi: 10.1145/3712285.3759819.