August 2, 2013
Computers are becoming increasingly powerful, but as Derrick Harris of GigaOm reports, they still have a long way to go when compared to the computers inside our skulls:
A team of Japanese and German researchers have carried out the largest-ever simulation of neural activity in the human brain, and the numbers are both amazing and humbling.
The hardware necessary to simulate the activity of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses (just 1 percent of a brain’s total neural network) for 1 biological second: 82,944 processors on the K supercomputer and 1 petabyte of memory (24MB per syapse). That 1 second of biological time took 40 minutes, on one of the world’s most-powerful systems, to compute.