bluebrainproject
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HPE supercomputer will help simulate mammalian brains
Scientists are about to get a serious assist in their quest to simulate brains. HPE has deployed Blue Brain 5, a supercomputer dedicated to simulations and reconstructions of mammalian brains as part of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne's Blue Brain Project. The system is based on HPE's existing SGI 8600 (above) and packs a hefty 372 compute nodes between its Xeon Gold, Xeon Phi and Tesla V100 processors, not to mention a whopping 94TB of memory. More importantly, it's flexible -- Blue Brain 5 has four configurations to prioritize different computing tasks, and it can host subsystems geared toward relevant tasks (including deep learning and visualization) while operating as a cohesive whole.
ICYMI: The Martian colony plan, simulated rat brain and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-424179{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-424179, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-424179{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-424179").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: We are rounding up Space Week with NASA's detailed plan to get earthlings to settle on Mars. Meanwhile other scientists teamed up to unravel how a rat's brain works, to then simulate it with a computer. Early testing shows how calcium affects the brain in a way that can only help with studies on neurological disorders. And Disney is jumping into more augmented reality with a coloring book app that brings creatures to life while they're worked on.
Brain simulation breakthrough reveals clues about sleep, memory
The Blue Brain Project is a vast effort by 82 scientists worldwide to digitally recreate the human brain. While still far from that goal, the team revealed a breakthrough that has already provided insight into sleep, memory and neurological disorders. They created a simulation of a third of a cubic millimeter of a rat's brain. While that might not sound like much, it involves 30,000 neurons and 37 million synapses. In addition, the simulated level of biological accuracy is far beyond anything so far. It allowed them to reproduce known brain activities -- such as how neurons respond to touch -- and has already yielded discoveries about the brain that were impossible to get biologically.
