IBM and EPFl (International Business Machines and L’Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne for acronym impaired) have committed to a joint two-year project to build a computer-simulated human brain, mapping the intricate workings of the neocortex.
The neocortex is the largest and most complex area of the brain, taking up about 85% of the brain’s mass. This area controls language, learning, memory, perception, and complex thought.
A huge undertaking, IBM and Swiss EPFL will be using IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer operating at 22.8 trillion floating-point operations per second (22.8 teraflops). For perspective’s sake, in the year 2000 the supercomputer speed limit was one teraflop.
Codenamed the Blue Brain Project, scientists plan to begin with mapping the neocortex and then expanding to other parts of the brain, until the entire system of gray matter is replicated at the cellular level.
With any luck, understanding the complex circuitries of the brain at micro levels will help reveal the underlying causes of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, depression, and autism.
“Modeling the brain at the cellular level is a massive undertaking because of the hundreds of thousands of parameters that need to be taken into account,” said Henry Markram, the EPFL professor heading up the project.
The computer generated Blue Brain will be a three-dimensional model that simulates high-speed electro-chemical interactions.
