JUST A REMINDER

Our brains are amazing devices:

Largest neuronal network simulation to date achieved using Japanese supercomputer

MedicalXpress
August 2, 2013

By exploiting the full computational power of the Japanese supercomputer, K Computer, researchers from the RIKEN HPCI Program for Computational Life Sciences, the Okinawa Institute of Technology Graduate University (OIST) in Japan and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany have carried out the largest general neuronal network simulation to date.

The simulation was made possible by the development of advanced novel data structures for the simulation software NEST. The relevance of the achievement for neuroscience lies in the fact that NEST is open-source software freely available to every scientist in the world.

Using NEST, the team, led by Markus Diesmann in collaboration with Abigail Morrison both now with the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine at Jülich, succeeded in simulating a network consisting of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses. To realize this feat, the program recruited 82,944 processors of the K Computer. In total, the simulator coordinated the use of about 1 petabyte of mainmemory, which corresponds to the aggregated memory of 250.000 PCs. The process took 40 minutes, to complete the simulation of 1 second of neuronal network activity in real, biological, time.