Arbor — A Morphologically-Detailed Neural Network Simulation Library for Contemporary High-Performance Computing Architectures

We introduce Arbor, a performance portable library for simulation of large networks of multi-compartment neurons on HPC systems. Arbor is open source software, developed under the auspices of the HBP. The performance portability is by virtue of back-end specific optimizations for x86 multicore, Intel KNL, and NVIDIA GPUs. When coupled with low memory overheads, these optimizations make Arbor an order of magnitude faster than the most widely-used comparable simulation software. The single-node performance can be scaled out to run very large models at extreme scale with efficient weak scaling.Keywords: HPC;GPU;neuroscience;neuron;softwar