Monday, March 23, 2015

World’s largest supercomputers took 40 minutes to calculate 1 second worth of human brain activity



Cray supercomputer - a museum piece now - Image source)

How many times have we told you to ignore all that blether from scientists about how they are building computers capable of thinking like humans? They might be able to build computers that think like scientists, but do we really need autistic computers?

The most powerful computers in the world are a long way away from being able to match the processing ability of a human brain however. And then there's the stuff like consciousness, intuition, empathy, compassion etc. which we don't even understand yet and so are not able to programme computers to emulate.
from World Of Technology

The most accurate simulation of the human brain to date has been carried out in a Japanese supercomputer, with a single second’s worth of activity from just one per cent of the complex organ taking one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers 40 minutes to calculate.

Researchers used the K computer in Japan, currently the fourth most powerful in the world, to simulate human brain activity. The computer has 705,024 processor cores and 1.4 million GB of RAM, but still took 40 minutes to crunch the data for just one second of brain activity.

The project, a joint enterprise between Japanese research group RIKEN, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University and Forschungszentrum Jülich, an interdisciplinary research center based in Germany, was the largest neuronal network simulation to date.

It used the open-source Neural Simulation Technology (NEST) tool to replicate a network consisting of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses.


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Will computers ever be able to think
Google's direct computer to brain interface
IBM thinks their new computer is smarter than humans
Can computers think? Exam Marking Computer Says No
March of the Machines
Transhumanism to synchronise our brains