On December 16, 2015 NVIDIA India awarded Dr. Shyam Diwakar the NVIDIA Innovation Award for Amrita School of Biotechnology’s work on Computational Neuroscience. The award was received by Ms. Manjusha Nair on Dr. Shyam’s behalf at the Professor’s meet event co-located with IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC 2015).

The Computational Neuroscience Lab team, led by Dr. Shyam Diwakar, is seeking to gain a greater understanding into brain disorders such as ataxia and Alzheimer’s disease that disrupt the lives of millions of people globally each year. Currently, over 44 million people suffer from the devastating effects of Alzheimer’s. As the global population ages, Dr. Diwakar’s work to understand and manage these conditions will become increasingly important. “Larger scale models help mimic and reconstruct brain function and dysfunction,” Dr. Diwakar explained. “With GPU acceleration, these implementations provide a precise elaborations of processes underlying brain dynamics.”

The most significant outcome of Dr. Diwakar’s research to date is greater visibility into and understanding of timing in brain processes and the role of single neurons in the neural network, providing new insight into brain operation and disorder. An example application of this research is in understanding physiological and pharmacological behaviour to predict the impact of drugs on brain dysfunctions.

Amrita School of Biotechnology is an NVIDIA GPU Research Center and NVIDIA GPU Teaching Center. Through this center, students learn to program with thousands of low-power graphical processing units (GPU) to solve large computational problems. They also host the GPU Supercomputing Facility for students and researchers to solve problems.

CASE STUDY: Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Accelerates Prediction of Neurological Disorders using GPUs