Last week, we presented a poster on a fascinating new result at the CoSyNe 2007 conference:
Neurobiologically realistic, large-scale cortical and sub-cortical simulations are bound to play a key role in computational neuroscience and its applications to cognitive computing. One hemisphere of the mouse cortex has roughly 8,000,000 neurons and 8,000 synapses per neuron. Modeling at this scale imposes tremendous constraints on computation, communication, and memory capacity of any computing platform.
We have designed and implemented a massively parallel cortical simulator with (a) phenomenological spiking neuron models; (b) spike-timing dependent plasticity; and (c) axonal delays.
We deployed the simulator on a 4096-processor BlueGene/L supercomputer with 256 MB per CPU. We were able to represent 8,000,000 neurons (80% excitatory) and 6,300 synapses per neuron in the 1 TB main memory of the system. Using a synthetic pattern of neuronal interconnections, at a 1 ms resolution and an average firing rate of 1 Hz, we were able to run 1s of model time in 10s of real time!
I believe that such cortical simulators are the linear accelerators of neuroscience. We are already able to study extremely large-scale cortical dynamics. This is a developing story…please stay tuned in!
Reference:
James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, and Dharmendra S. Modha, "Towards real-time, mouse-scale cortical simulations," CoSyNe: Computational and Systems Neuroscience, Salt Lake City, Utah, Feb 22-25, 2007 PDF