The K Computer, The Most Accurate and Largest Brain Simulator To Date


rikenAccording to Japanese scientists, RIKEN's K computer, the fourth most powerful supercomputer known in the world, has accomplished something huge. It has officially and accurately mapped one second's worth of human brain activity. Measuring a single second of activity is also known as one percent of the entire neurological process. The K computer simulated this process in 40 minutes with its 705,024 processor cores, and 1.4 million GB of RAM. To no surprise, a supercomputer taking 40 minutes to figure out what happens in a mere second of our ol' noggin only amplifies the complexity that is the human brain. Although today’s technology may have computational speed and power to rival human response, the human brain still proves to be smarter than any computer is capable of.

riken2The project is a joint enterprise between teams at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japanese research group RIKEN, and German research center, Forschungszentrum Jülich. Their goal was to test the proficiency of simulation technology. Their effort in crunching this data involved using the open-source Neural Simulation Technology, or NEST. The NEST tool replicated a structure of over 1.73 billion nerve cells, and 10.4 trillion synapses.

riken1The new knowledge gained by these groups will promote the formulation of new simulation software. Additionally, neuroscientists will get a glimpse at what they can expect from the soon-to-be future of 'exascale computing'. Exascale computers will have the ability to carry out a quintillion floating point operations per second. Thought to be the same adequacy of an actual human brain, this could make for the next goal to come true, real-time simulation of the brain's activity. According to scientist Markus Diesmann, “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".

Topics: Technology News Inventions & Innovations

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