Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Seed: Out of the Blue

The article referred to in the link below describes how Blue Brain works.  If the author's belief that the human brain can be made from a scaled up version of the virtual synapses we have now then we only wait for the arrival of much more powerful computers.  Many experts point to around the year 2020. 

 

 

Seed: Out of the Blue 

In fact, the model is so successful that its biggest restrictions are now technological. "We have already shown that the model can scale up," Markram says. "What is holding us back now are the computers." The numbers speak for themselves. Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you'd need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That's about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google's servers. (Given current technology, a machine capable of such power would be the size of several football fields.) Energy consumption is another huge problem. The human brain requires about 25 watts of electricity to operate. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion . But if computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he'll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.

Seed: Out of the Blue

 

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