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Supercomputer to build 3D brain

Neuroscientists are to build the most detailed model of the human brain with thehelp of an IBM supercomputer.

Experts at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, will spend the nexttwo years creating a 3D simulation of the neocortex.This is the part of the brain thought to be responsible for language, learning, memory andcomplex thought.The researchers believe the project will give them fresh insights into the most remarkableorgan in the body."Modelling the brain at the cellular level is a massive undertaking because of the hundredsof thousands of parameters that need to be taken into account," said Henry Markram, theEPFL professor leading the project.The Swiss scientist and his colleagues will have at their disposal an IBM's eServer Blue Genesupercomputer.

Up the pace

The system to be installed at their EPFL lab will take up the floor space of about fourrefrigerators, and will have a peak processing speed of at least 22.8 trillion floating-pointoperations per second (22.8 teraflops), making it one of the most powerful supercomputersin the world.Five years ago, no supercomputer in the world was capable of more than one teraflop.The effort has been dubbed the Blue Brain Project. It is a daunting undertaking given themyriad of electro-chemical connections that must be mapped.By using a supercomputer to run experiments in real time, Professor Markram hopes toaccelerate substantially the pace of brain research."With an accurate computer-based model of the brain much of the pre-testing and planningnormally required for a major experiment could be done 'in silico' rather than in thelaboratory."With certain simulations we anticipate that a full day's worth of 'wet lab' research could bedone in a matter of seconds on Blue Gene."The Blue Brain Project will start with the neocortex but scientists expect eventually toproduced a 3D model of the entire brain.Researchers expect not only to get a better understanding of how the organ is wired up butalso to use that "atlas" of neurocircuitry to probe how the brain functions - andmalfunctions.

The scientists say the project could lead, for example, to new ideas on how psychiatricdisorders develop - illnesses such as autism, schizophrenia, and depression.Supercomputers have recently become a major tool in a range of advanced biologicalapplications, from helping to piece together fragmented DNA information to the design of new drug molecules.

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The neocortex is organised into thousands of columns of neurons

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Supercomputers are increasinlgy being used in research to model biomolecules

The Tech Lab: Steve FurberProfessor Steve Furber is one of the pioneers of the UK's computer industry. Hewas a principal designer of the BBC Micro that gave many of Britain's current hi-tech workers their first taste of technology. He has now turned his attention tomimicking the human brain.

Most of the frontiers of science, from particle physics to radio astronomy, seem to beconcerned with the incredibly small or the unimaginably large.But there is a lump of stuff inside each of our heads that we could easily hold in our handsand look at, yet we have no idea how it works.We know that our brains are built from a hundred billion small cells called neurons, andthese cells sit in a biochemical bath and send electrical pulses to each other every so often.It is a strange thing to realise that everything that we see, smell, hear, think, dream andsay - indeed our very being - is just a consequence of those billions of cells inside our headsgoing "ping" from time to time.We now have a fair idea of how those neurons are organised into major functional areaswithin the brain. Hi-tech scanners give us ever-more detailed glimpses into which brainareas are active, and in what order, when we receive particular inputs or think particularthoughts.But we still have no idea of the spike "language" that the neurons use to talk to each other,nor how that spiking activity becomes coherent thoughts and actions.

Brain power

Understanding the brain has turned out to be far more difficult than anyone imagined. EarlyAI focussed on symbolic logic, which computers are very good at but people aren't so that

wasn't really getting at what it means for a human to be intelligent. Can we expectcomputers ever to begin to emulate the achievements of human intelligence?There are two ways to look at this question: Firstly, to ask when computers may bepowerful enough to simulate the detailed workings of the brain, to which the answer seemsto be that we aren't there yet, but we are getting close.Secondly we can ask when we might know how to program those computers to perform thistask, to which the answer is still unknown.At the dawn of the computer age 60 years ago machines were a million million times tooslow to model the brain in real time, but Petaflop supercomputers have closed that gap.The programming challenge remains immense, though initiatives such as EPFL's Blue Brainproject in Switzerland are addressing this head-on.That is gathering huge quantities of biological data on the types and behaviours of neurons,and building high-fidelity biological models on a high-end IBM supercomputer.Neurons are very complex living cells that have evolved to perform an informationprocessing function within a living organism.One of the great unknowns in understanding the brain is the extent to which the finerdetails of a neuron's structure is important to its information processing function, asopposed to being required to stay alive, maintain chemical balance, take up energy, or justbeing an artefact of evolution and the way the cell has developed within the organism.

Model makers

At Manchester we make the assumption that most of the phenomena we are interested inarise at the network level, so we discard much of the biological detail in favour of modellinglarger numbers of simpler neurons. But, as the famous paraphrase of Einstein insists,"everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler."How far can we go before we risk losing some vital aspect of the neuron's informationprocessing function? This question will only be answered as we begin to understand theoperational principles at work inside the brain - as we begin to learn the language of thespikes.

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