NEW YORK: The world’s most powerful supercomputers took 40 minutes to simulate one second of human brain activity. Researchers used the K computer in Japan to simulate the brain activity and is said to be the most accurate simulation of the human brain ever.
K computer, which is currently the fourth most powerful in the world, does 10 quadrillion calculations a second . It has 705,024 processor cores and 1.4 million GB of RAM, but still it took 40 minutes to crunch the data for just one second of human brain activity.
The project, a joint enterprise between Japanese research group RIKEN, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University and Forschungszentrum Jülich, an interdisciplinary research center based in Germany, was the largest neuronal network simulation to date, according to The Telegraph.
The achievement of the researchers offers neuroscientists a glimpse of what can be achieved by using the next generation of computers – so-called exascale computing.
Exascale computers are those which can carry out a quintillion floating point operations per second, which is an important milestone in computing as it is thought to be the same power as a human brain and therefore opens the door to potential real-time simulation of the organ’s activity.
Currently there is no computer in existence that powerful, but Intel has said that it aims to have such a machine in operation by 2018.
“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…will be possible with exascale computers – hopefully available within the next decade,” said one of the scientists, Markus Diesmann.