The Cortical Column

Let’s cut straight to the numbers:

We represented a rat-scale cortical model (55 million neurons, 442 billion synapses) in 8TB memory of a 32,768-processor BlueGene/L

Dharmendra Modha of IBM’s Blue Brain project presented these results yesterday at the Supercomputing 2007 Conference in a paper titled “Anatomy of a Cortical Simulator.” (pdf) This is by far the largest simulation in the history of computational neuroscience, trumping their previous mouse-scale model by a factor of 3.5. While it accounts for interactions at the resolution of molecules, giving them the title of “biologically-inspired,” it does not account for the large-scale anatomical connectivity and neural differentiation of the rat brain. This model is, quite literally, neuron soup. Cortical neuron soup, that is. Here we can see the size of the model as a function of the number of CPUs and neurons per group:

I plan to write more about their simulator, C2, and other interesting details of the paper soon.