The brain has enthralled scientists and philosophers for millennia. What drives this machine in our heads? And what control does it have over our bodies? Questions like these have puzzled the finest minds.


Today, organisations such as the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, part of the Donders Institute in the Netherlands, are unlocking the brain’s mysteries and providing us with many of the answers we’ve been looking for. Through its work, we’re beginning to see the workings of the brain in detail and, crucially, how it affects conditions such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease and dyslexia.

These breakthroughs are thanks to powerful computers, processing data from brain imaging machines. It’s why many organisations – and Donders in particular – have looked to create high performance computing (HPC) infrastructures to support their work and deliver the kind of research that is being published in medical journals worldwide. However, Donders was a little different from the other organisations. It wanted to build a HPC environment using Dell™ Precision™ workstations instead of servers. This wasn’t so unusual if you consider the institute had plenty of room in the datacentre, and the HPC environment wouldn’t be so big it would cause issues of power consumption. Plus, the beauty of this solution was that the workstations featured powerful Intel® Xeon® processors and up to 24 gigabytes of system memory. Better still, Donders could re-use the machines as desktops when they were no longer required for the HPC environment.

Based on the institute’s own calculations, it has saved around 20 per cent on the cost of a creating a HPC solution by choosing workstations. More importantly, its scientists can continue with their pioneering work, safe in the knowledge that they have the computing power available to support their research.

Watch the video  to hear the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging talk about their work and new HPC solution.