IBM having "brainstorm" with Blue Gene

IBM has decided to try and achieve the greatest goal of almost all borderline computer-related sciences, the perfectly accurate and working simulation of a human brain.

Henry Markram and colleagues at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, will spend the next two years using IBM's supercomputer Blue Gene to create a working 3-dimensional model of the neurocortex, which accounts for about 85 percent of the human brain's mass and is thought to be responsible for language, learning, memory and complex thought. Blue Gene will have 8,000 processors that will operate at 23 trillion operations per seconds. Each processor will be used to simulate one or two neurons.

But it's quite clear that this task won't be achieved in the near future. The first step will be to simulate a rat's neurocortical column, a structure half a millimeter in diameter and 2 millimeters long that contains about 60,000 neurons. (The human brain contains 10 billion neurons.)

Once it is clear that one column has been simulated, the project will move on to simulating several such columns, verifying its results by experiments with real brain tissues. Then, the path is clear to move up to larger simulations. After maybe ten years or more, it may even be possible to create a model of the human brain.

Markram and IBM both emphasize that this project's goal is not to create artificial intelligence, but to establish once and for all the way neurons in the brain interact with one another.

"We believe that we will be able to capture the heart of the information process, not just the column but how the information was formed in memories and retrieved." said Markram.