Computers Simulate 50 Percent of a Mouse Brain

From LiveScience.com:

A team of researchers from the IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada successfully simulated the neural activity of half of a mouse brain on a BlueGene L supercomputer that had 4,096 processors, each one of which used 256MB of memory. James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, and Dharmendra S Modha set forth their methods in a provocatively titled research note "Towards Real-Time, Mouse-Scale Cortical Simulations". What is a mouse brain, that we should wish to move towards simulating it? One half of a real mouse brain has about eight million neurons, each of which has up to eight thousand connections (synapses) with other neurons; it's a very complex system, with a staggering amount of processing power. The simulation was so computationally intensive that the supercomputer could not even handle real-time mouse cogitation. The researchers ran the simulation at one-tenth speed for only ten seconds.

Read the whole article