Scientists Preparing to Simulate Human Brain on Supercomputer

"The team, which is being led by Jülich neurophysics professor Markus Diesmann, will leverage the Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research (JUPITER) supercomputer for their simulation. JUPITER is currently the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world according to the TOP500 list, and features thousands of graphical processing units. The team demonstrated last month that a " spiking neural network " could be scaled up and run on JUPITER, effectively matching the cerebral cortex's 20 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections."

"Previous attempts, dating back a decade, like the Human Brain Project, fell largely flat, despite considerable government funding. But as New Scientist reports, the Jülich researchers think they can push things forward. The idea is to bring together several models of smaller regions of the brain with a supercomputer to run simulations of billions of firing neurons."

In 2024, researchers completed the first-ever map of the circuitry of a fruit fly brain. The fruit fly brain contains almost 500 feet of wiring and 54.5 million synapses within a grain-of-sand-sized organ. The Jülich Research Centre aims to simulate the entire human brain using the JUPITER exascale supercomputer. The plan is to combine models of smaller brain regions and run large-scale spiking neural network simulations of billions of neurons. JUPITER demonstrated scaling a spiking neural network to match the cerebral cortex's roughly 20 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections. Large networks can behave qualitatively differently than small ones. The human brain remains largely mysterious.

Read at Futurism