The world’s most powerful supercomputers can now run simulations of billions of neurons, and researchers hope these models will offer unprecedented insights into the way our brains work.
What would it mean to simulate a human brain? – starts by questioning an article from .
Today’s most powerful computing systems now have enough computing power to run simulations of billions of neurons, comparable to the sophistication of real brains.
We increasingly understand how these neurons are interconnected, which, as the same magazine writes, leads to brain simulations that researchers hope will reveal previously hidden secrets of how the brain works.
Researchers have long tried to isolate specific parts of the brain, modeling smaller regions with a computer to explain certain brain functions. “However, we have never been able to bring them all together in one place, in a single larger brain model where we can check whether these ideas are minimally consistent,” he says. Markus Diesmannfrom the Jülich Research Center, in Germany.
“This is now changing”he says, to New Scientist.
This is largely due to the power of today’s most advanced supercomputerswhich are now approaching exa scale, meaning they can perform a billion trillion operations per second.
There are only four machines of this type, according to the list.
Diesmann and his team are considering running large-scale brain simulations on one of these systems, called JUPITERbased in Germany.
Last month, Diesmann’s team showed that a simple model of the brain’s neurons and their synapses, called a spiking neural network, could be configured and scaled up to run on JUPITER’s thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs), giving it a size of 20 billion neurons and 100 billion connections — equivalent to the human cerebral cortex, where almost all higher brain functions take place.
Full-scale brain simulations could allow researchers to test basic theories of brain function that are impossible to study in smaller models or real brains, such as how memories are formed.
