Thought I would pass this along.

Posted from:
http://news.bbc.co.uk...


Mouse brain simulated on computer
BlueGene L under construction, IBM
It takes a supercomputer to mimic a mouse brain
US researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer.

The scientists ran a "cortical simulator" that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer.

In other smaller simulations the researchers say they have seen characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains.

Now the team is tuning the simulation to make it run faster and to make it more like a real mouse brain.

Life signs

Brain tissue presents a huge problem for simulation because of its complexity and the sheer number of potential interactions between the elements involved.

The three researchers, James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, and Dharmendra S Modha, laid out how they went about it in a very short research note entitled "Towards Real-Time, Mouse-Scale Cortical Simulations".

Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons each one of which can have up to 8,000 synapses, or connections, with other nerve fibres.

Modelling such a system, the trio wrote, puts "tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform".

The team, from the IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada, ran the simulation on a BlueGene L supercomputer that had 4,096 processors, each one of which used 256MB of memory.

Using this machine the researchers created half a virtual mouse brain that had 8,000 neurons that had up to 6,300 synapses.

The vast complexity of the simulation meant that it was only run for ten seconds at a speed ten times slower than real life - the equivalent of one second in a real mouse brain.

On other smaller simulations the researchers said they had seen "biologically consistent dynamical properties" emerge as nerve impulses flowed through the virtual cortex.

In these other tests the team saw the groups of neurons form spontaneously into groups. They also saw nerves in the simulated synapses firing in a ways similar to the staggered, co-ordinated patterns seen in nature.

The researchers say that although the simulation shared some similarities with a mouse's mental make-up in terms of nerves and connections it lacked the structures seen in real mice brains.

Imposing such structures and getting the simulation to do useful work might be a much more difficult task than simply setting up the plumbing.

For future tests the team aims to speed up the simulation, make it more neurobiologically faithful, add structures seen in real mouse brains and make the responses of neurons and synapses more detailed.

Cognitive Computing Lecture
Solid State Circuits Society
IEEE Santa Clara Valley Chapter

http://ewh.ieee.org/m...

June 17, 2010

Speaker: Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha, IBM Research Almaden
National Semiconductor Building E Auditorium
2900 Semiconductor Dr., Santa Clara, CA 95051
Refreshments at 6:00 PM; Talk at 6:30 PM.

The talk will outline an ambitious project to combine neuroscience, supercomputing, and nanotechnology with the goal of creating new software, electronics hardware, and computer architecture that can understand, adapt and respond to an informative environment in ways that extend traditional computation to include fundamentally different capabilities found in biological brains.

Dr. Modha is founding manager of the Cognitive Computing group at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. He is the Principal Investigator for DARPA SyNAPSE team. His group performed cortical simulations at scale of cat cerebral cortex (1 billion neurons, 10 trillion synapses) only 100x slower than real-time on a 147,456 processor BlueGene/P supercomputer.

I added some references here:
http://www.meetup.com...