Mouse cortex simulated on supercomputer
April 30, 2007 | Source: KurzweilAI
IBM researchers have designed and implemented a massively parallel simulation of a mouse cortex, using a 4096-processor Blue Gene/L supercomputer.
They represented 8 million neurons and 6300 synapses per neuron in the 1 TB memory of the system. At 1 ms resolution and average firing rate of 1 Hz, they were able to run 1 second of model time in 10 seconds of real time.
“On other (smaller) models, we have observed biologically consistent dynamical properties such as spontaneous formation of neuronal groups and synchronous/asynchronous firing patterns,” the researchers said in an IBM research report, “Toward real-time mouse-scale cortical simulations.” “Our goal is to continually refine the computational architecture and to add neurobiological details such as macro and micro neuroanatomy, neuromodulators, and more detailed neuron and synapse dynamical equations.”