Today British scientists at The University of Manchester made history by switching on the world’s largest “human brain” supercomputer called the “Spiking Neural Network Architecture” (SpiNNaker) machine.
The SpiNNaker, first conceived in 2006 with initial funding by the U.K.-based Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), cost £15 million to create, and over a decade to build. It’s now supported by the European Human Brain Project (HBP), a research initiative in neuroscience, medicine and computing. The HBP is a 10-year project funded by the European Union that started in 2013. It employs 500 scientists at more than 100 universities, research facilities, and teaching hospitals across Europe.
SpiNNaker was built under the leadership of Professor Steve Furber at The University of Manchester, a principal designer of two products that earned the Queen's Award for Technology —the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor, and the BBC Microcomputer.
“The ultimate objective for the project has always been a million cores in a single computer for real time brain modelling applications, and we have now achieved it, which is fantastic.” - Professor Steve Furber, The University of Manchester
Inspired by the human brain, the SpiNNaker is capable of sending billions of small amounts of information simultaneously. The SpiNNaker has a staggering 1 million processors that are able to perform over 200 million actions per second.
The scientists plan to use the neuromorphic supercomputer to eventually model up to 1 billion biological neurons in real-time, or approximately 1% of the human brain’s estimated 100 billion biological neurons. The SpiNNaker has already been used to simulate an 80,000 neuron model of a segment of the brain’s cortex.
The supercomputer was also recently used to control a robot, called the SpOmnibot, to interpret real-time visual information and navigation.
Now neuroscientists are able to run real-time large scale simulations in order to understand how the human brain functions. SpiNNaker has simulated the basal ganglia, a region located in the deep part of the brain that is affected by Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative and progressive neurological disease. With supercomputing abilities, these types of simulations will greatly accelerate neuroscience research that can potentially lead to new treatments for brain diseases and disorders in the future.
Copyright © 2018 Cami Rosso All rights reserved.
SOURCE : psychologytoday
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