IBM researchers have designed and "implemented a massively parallel cortical simulator" of a mouse's brain. The researchers believe that "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."

The researchers said that "modeling at this scale imposes tremendous constraints on computation, communication, and memory capacity of any computing platform." The simulator was deployed on a BlueGene/L supercomputer.

The researchers said in a short report that the future goal is to "continually refine the computational architecture and to add neurobiological details." Co-author Dharmendra Modha said in a blog post last week that he believes "such cortical simulators are the linear accelerators of neuroscience." -- Winter Casey