The Race to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain
BM’s Dharmendra Modha has a vision. “Cognitive computing seeks to engineer the mind by reverse engineering the brain,” says Modha, a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, just south of San Francisco. “The mind arises from the brain, which is made up of billions of neurons that are linked by an Internet-like network.”
Modha’s future computer may have taken a giant leap forward with the recent announcement at the SC09 high-performance computing conference in Portland, Ore., of a joint IBM project led by Modha with researchers from five universities and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dubbed “Blue Matter,” a software platform for neuroscience modeling, it pulls together archived magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan data and assembles it on a Blue Gene/P Supercomputer. IBM has essentially simulated a brain with 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses — one they claim is about the equivalent of a cat’s cortex, or 4.5% of a human brain.
