The human brain is one of the many marvelous parts of humans. It has been quite interesting over the last few years to read books and hear lectures on the subject. (See references in patrickWeb). The complexity of the brain can appear overwhelming but Big Blue is trying to make it understandable by working with a team of computational neuroscientists in Switzerland on a project called The Blue Brain. The goal of the project — being developed at the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne— is to create a digital 3D model of the brain and use simulations from the model to develop cures for prevoiusly incurable conditions.
IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer is helping to advance our understanding of important biological processes such as protein folding and a growing list of applications including hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, climate modeling and financial modeling. The topics have vocabularies of many-syllable words but they are changing the world for the better. The Blue Gene supercomputer has a peak speed of 360 Teraflops. In layman terms that means that the machine can perform 360,000,000,000,000 (trillion) calculations every second. That kind of horsepower doesn’t match the human brain but it is getting closer. I have seen a Blue Gene in operation at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. It is a sight to behold.
Back to brains. The idea is to create a detailed model of the circuitry in the neocortex – the largest and most complex part of the human brain. Over time, the project hopes to model other areas of the brain and eventually build an accurate, computer-based model of the entire brain. The process starts with "wet" chemistry. A dye is injected into each neuron of the brain to reveal a kind of map called a morphology. After gaining a view of the neurons, it sets the groundwork to build a digital model in the Blue Gene that emulates the real thing. The neocortex is organized into thousands of columns of neurons. Each column has a diameter of less than two one-hundredths of an inch and contains 10,000 neurons. Each neuron stands a little more than 1/16 inches high and receives over 10,000 inputs from other neurons. Suffice it to say that the brain is a very complex thing. In the case of Blue Brain, the end result will be a greatly enhanced understanding of how the human brain works which will lead to curing the things that can go wrong with it. A better understanding of the brain — the supercomputer of all supercomputers — will also help develop even better supercomputers.