Dharmendra Modha’s IBM simulation: 10^14 synapses

It’s a milestone of sorts, the paper is here [pdf]. Here’s the response from Gary Marcus at the New Yorker. Do read all of the comments.

Kudos to Dharmendra Modha

My friend and colleague Dharmendra Modha’s new paper on the network architecture in monkey brain has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His blog is here. For those with access, the paper itself is here.

Congrats to Dharmendra and Big Blue!

Big Blue’s Dharmendra Modha and Cat Neocortex simulation

Dharmendra’s team at IBM are making the news this morning. Here’s AP’s Jordan Robertson’s story.

Money quote:

A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they’ve simulated a cat’s cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has.