August 5, 2013 at 12:29Simulation of the 1st second of activity of 1% of the brain took 40 minutes on a cluster of 82,944 processors
A group of German and Japanese researchers performed an approximate computer simulation of the brain activity of a network of human brain neurons at a scale of 1% of the brain’s neural network for 1 second. Today it is the largest experiment in the simulation of brain activity.
One percent of the brain is 1.73 billion nerve cells and 10.4 trillion synapses connecting them. To conduct the experiment, scientists used 82,944 K supercomputer processors and 1 petabyte of memory (24 bytes per synapse).
Supercomputer K
Experiment made possible by NEST software with “advanced innovative data structures”, according to a press releaseInstitute of Physico-Chemical Research of Japan (RIKEN). This free software is available to researchers from all over the world, so anyone can repeat the experiment on their own computer cluster with enough RAM.
A second of neural activity on a K supercomputer with a performance of 10.5 petaflops (the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the Top 500 list ) was calculated within 40 minutes. Nerve cells connected to each other randomly. The experiment did not aim to find out some new knowledge about the work of the human brain, but only to check the limitations of the technology of its computer simulation. In the future, the software will be improved, and then it will be possible to put more meaningful experiments.
In addition, scientists now have an idea of what approximately computer power is required, which simulate 100% of the human brain in real time. Probably, this will become possible in 10-20 years. If you do not set a real-time limit, then simulation of 100% of the brain in "slow" mode is already possible on next-generation supercomputers with a memory capacity of 100 petabytes and a performance of more than 1 exaflops.
One percent of the brain is 1.73 billion nerve cells and 10.4 trillion synapses connecting them. To conduct the experiment, scientists used 82,944 K supercomputer processors and 1 petabyte of memory (24 bytes per synapse).
Supercomputer K
Experiment made possible by NEST software with “advanced innovative data structures”, according to a press releaseInstitute of Physico-Chemical Research of Japan (RIKEN). This free software is available to researchers from all over the world, so anyone can repeat the experiment on their own computer cluster with enough RAM.
A second of neural activity on a K supercomputer with a performance of 10.5 petaflops (the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the Top 500 list ) was calculated within 40 minutes. Nerve cells connected to each other randomly. The experiment did not aim to find out some new knowledge about the work of the human brain, but only to check the limitations of the technology of its computer simulation. In the future, the software will be improved, and then it will be possible to put more meaningful experiments.In addition, scientists now have an idea of what approximately computer power is required, which simulate 100% of the human brain in real time. Probably, this will become possible in 10-20 years. If you do not set a real-time limit, then simulation of 100% of the brain in "slow" mode is already possible on next-generation supercomputers with a memory capacity of 100 petabytes and a performance of more than 1 exaflops.