Supercomputer moves closer to emulating workings of the human brain

 (AP photo / Todd Kirtley, IBM General Manager)

“I-Robot” anyone? For decades, computer scientists have been predicting that 5th generation computers (computers that can emulate the workings of the human brain) were right around the corner – always citing the disclaimer “but computers, AI systems and expert systems all need to be hundreds of times more powerful than they are now”. We’re still pretty far from robots exhibiting 100% artificial intelligence – but IBM is making strides in that area.

At the 11/18/2009 supercomputing conference, IBM announced significant progress toward creating a computer system that simulates and emulates the brain's abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, while rivaling the brain's low power and energy consumption and compact size.

Scientists at IBM Research working with colleagues from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, have performed the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex, or, 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses.

To perform their first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex, the team built a cortical simulator that incorporates a number of innovations in computation, memory and communication as well as sophisticated biological details from neurophysiology and neuroanatomy. The simulation was performed using the cortical simulator on Lawrence Livermore National Lab's Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer with 147,456 CPUs and 144 terabytes of RAM.

As the amount of digital data that we create continues to grow and the world becomes more instrumented and interconnected, there is a need for new kinds of computing systems - systems with a new intelligence that can spot hard-to-find patterns in vastly varied kinds of data, both digital and sensory; analyze and integrate information real-time in a context-dependent way; and deal with the ambiguities found in complex, real-world environments.

"Learning from the brain is an attractive way to overcome power and density challenges faced in computing today," said Josephine Cheng, IBM Fellow and lab director of IBM Research. "As the digital and physical worlds continue to merge and computing becomes more embedded in the fabric of our daily lives, it's imperative that we create a more intelligent computing system that can help us make sense of the vast amount of information that's increasingly available to us, much the way our brains can quickly interpret and act on complex tasks."

So for now, scientists have a supercomputer’s capability to model and mimic a brain slightly more complex than a normal cat cortex. We’re still decades away, but fifth generation computing has been a milestone in the making; and IBM just took one big step in reaching that milestone.

(image from Microsoft Office Online)

Also see:

• 3G?.. 4G?.. what?
• More on Computer Literacy
• More on IBM Research

This photo provided by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory shows the Jaguar supercomputer at the Department of Energy lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Monday, Nov. 16, 2009. The Cray XT5 supercomputer known as Jaguar at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility has become the fastest in the world. It will be listed as No. 1 on the TOP500 list of supercomputers announced Tuesday Nov. 17, 2009. (AP Photo/Oak Ridge National Lab, Curtis Boles)

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