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Simulating 1 Second of Real Brain Activity Takes 40 Minutes and 83k Processors
In the largest-ever simulation of neural activity in the human brain, the world's fourth-fastest supercomputer took 40 minutes to simulate one second of actual brain activity.
Credit: Pasadenaville.com
The world's fourth-fastest supercomputer needed 40 minutes to simulate one second of actual brain activity on a network equivalent to 1 percent of a brain's neural network.
A team of Japanese and German researchers were behind the effort to simulate the activity of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected to 10.4 trillion synapses, the largest-ever simulation of neural activity in the human brain.
The simulation involved 82,944 processors on the K supercomputer and 1 petabyte of memory, amounting to 24 bytes per synapse. If computing time scales linearly with the size of the network, it would take nearly two and a half days to simulate 1 second of activity for an entire brain.
"If petascale computers like the K computer are capable of representing 1 percent 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," says project leader Markus Diesmann.
The simulation was a test of the open source NEST simulation software.
From GigaOm.com
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