BlueGene is one of the world largest and most powerful supercomputers, but keeping the computer busy doesn’t seem to be a problem for IBM. There are many researchers that are interested in using the power of the supercomputer and one of the latest studies have been to simulate one of the most complex of Nature’s creations; a brain. Not a whole brain though, but still far more than anyone has been able to do before. A mouse brain has about 16-20 million neurons and up to 20,000 synapses to other neurons. The half brain that the researchers James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan and Dharmendra S Modha has simulated consists of 8 million neurons and 6,300 synapses each.
The work was presented during CoSyNe 2007 and the goal has been to simulate one half of a mouse brain using a BlueGene/L supercomputer with 4096 processors with 256MB RAM each, I.e. a total of 1TB. Through synthetic interneural signal patterns, with a 1ms resolution and a signal frequency at 1Hz they were able to simulate and see 1 second of brain activity during 10 seconds in real-time.
In later studies they’ve been able to study the dynamics of the cortical parts of the brain at a large scale and hope go even bigger soon. Those of you who wants to know more can turn to Modha’s blog, where he has also published their study. Modha and the rest are expected to reveal even more about their research during the coming Cognitive Computing 2007 on May 2-3.
