To calculate a single second's worth of brain's activity, one of the world's most powerful supercomputers took 40 minutes. This project, carried out on a Japanese supercomputer, was reportedly one of the largest neuronal network simulations to date, Telegraph reports. Unsurprisingly, this represented just one per cent of the neuronal network of the human brain.
Apparently, the goal of the project was to test the limits off simulation technology and the capabilities of the computer, rather than providing new insights into the brain.
Researchers involved in the project employed the K computer in Japan to create the simulation. The computer has 7-5,024 processor cores and 1.4 million GB of RAM and is the fourth most powerful in the world. The project used the open-source Neural Simulation Technology (NEST) tool to replicate a network of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses.
The researchers' efforts are expected to help in the construction of new simulation software and to demonstrate what can be accomplished by using the next generation of computers, which are otherwise called exascale computing. Exascale computers are thought to have the same power as the human brain as they can carry out a quintillion floating point operations per second.
One of the scientists said, "If petascale computers like the K computer are capable of representing one per cent of the network of a human brain today, then we know that simulating the whole brain at the level of the individual nerve cell and its synapses will be possible with exascale computers - hopefully available within the next decade."
The project is a joint enterprise between Japanese research group RIKEN, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University and Forschungszentrum Jülich, an interdisciplinary research center based in Germany.
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