Submission + - Supercomputer Launches World's Largest Neuronal-Network Simulation (slashdot.org)
Nerval's Lobster writes: Researchers in Japan and Germany have carried out what’s being described as the largest neuronal network simulation to date. That simulation leveraged open-source NEST software running on K computer, a Fujitsu-manufactured supercomputer based at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Japan. K computer ranked fourth on the most recent Top500 list, a ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers; the platform, armed with 705,024 cores, is capable of 10,510 teraflops of performance (as measured via the Linpack benchmark; in theory, the system could push that to 11,280.4 teraflops). In conjunction with a research team at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine at Jülich, K computer simulated a neuronal network of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses. That sounds like a whole lot of nerve cells and synapses, but in fact it’s only 1 percent of the neuronal network in the brain. “If peta-scale computers like the K computer are capable of representing 1 percent of the network of a human brain today,” team leader Markus Diesmann wrote in a statement, “then we know that simulating the whole brain at the level of the individual nerve cell and its synapses will be possible with exa-scale computers hopefully available within the next decade.”
