Posts tagged SyNAPSE
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
IBM Research And LLNL Claim 1014 Synapse Simulation
Inspired by the function, power, and volume of the organic brain, IBMis reportedly developing TrueNorth, a novel modular, scalable, non-von Neumann, ultra-low power, cognitive computing architecture. The TrueNorth system consists of a scalable network of neurosynaptic cores, with each core containing neurons, dendrites, synapses, and axons. Also, to help the computation of TrueNorth, IBM has developed Compass, a multi-threaded, massively parallel functional simulator and a parallel compiler that maps a network of long-distance pathways in the macaque monkey brain to TrueNorth.
The research was recently presented at the Super Computing 2012 (SC12) conference in Salt Lake City. The paper, “Compass: A scalable simulator for an architecture for Cognitive Computing" is available online.
IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LBNL) demonstrated near-perfect weak scaling on a 16 rack IBM Blue Gene/Q (262,144 processor cores, 256 TB memory), achieving an unprecedented scale of 256 million neurosynaptic cores containing 65 billion neurons and 16 trillion synapses running only 388× slower than real time with an average spiking rate of 8.1 Hz. By using emerging PGAS communication primitives, IBM also demonstrated 2× better real-time performance over MPI primitives on a 4 rack Blue Gene/P (16384 processor cores, 16 TB memory).
Also, since submitting the original paper, the work has continued using 96 Blue Gene/Q racks of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab Sequoia supercomputer (1,572,864 processor cores, 1.5 PB memory, 98,304 MPI processes, and 6,291,456 threads), IBM and LBNL achieved an unprecedented scale of 2.084 billion neurosynaptic cores containing 53x1010 neurons and 1.37x1014 synapses running only 1542× slower than real time. Here is PDF of IBM Research Report, RJ 10502.
As in the image above, A Network of Neurosynaptic Cores Derived from Long-distance Wiring in the Monkey Brain -Neuro-synaptic cores are locally clustered into brain-inspired regions, and each core is represented as an individual point along the ring. Arcs are drawn from a source core to a destination core with an edge color defined by the color assigned to the source core.
Scientists to simulate human brain inside a supercomputer
Scientists at its forerunner, the Switzerland-based Blue Brain Project, have been working since 2005 to feed a computer with vast quantities of data and algorithms produced from studying tiny slivers of rodent gray matter.
Last month they announced a significant advancement when they were able to use their simulator to accurately predict the location of synapses in the neocortex, effectively mapping out the complex electrical brain circuitry through which thoughts travel.
Henry Markram, the South African-born neuroscientist who heads the project, said the breakthrough would have taken “decades, if not centuries” to chart using a real neocortex. He said it was proof their concept, dubbed “brain in a box” by Nature magazine, would work.
Now the team are joining forces with other scientists to create the Human Brain Project. As its name suggests, they aim to scale up their model to recreate an entire human brain.
It is a step that will need both a huge increase in funding and access to computers so advanced that they have yet to be built.
If their current bid for €1 billion ($1.3 billion) of European Commission funding over the next 10 years is successful, Markram predicts that his computer neuroscientists are a decade away from producing a synthetic mind that could, in theory, talk and interact in the same way humans do.
Blue Brain Project Accurately Predicts Connections between Neurons
One of the greatest challenges in neuroscience is to identify the map of synaptic connections between neurons. Called the “connectome,” it is the holy grail that will explain how information flows in the brain. In a landmark paper, published the week of 17th of September in PNAS, the EPFL’s Blue Brain Project (BBP) has identified key principles that determine synapse-scale connectivity by virtually reconstructing a cortical microcircuit and comparing it to a mammalian sample. These principles now make it possible to predict the locations of synapses in the neocortex.
“This is a major breakthrough, because it would otherwise take decades, if not centuries, to map the location of each synapse in the brain and it also makes it so much easier now to build accurate models,” says Henry Markram, head of the BBP.
To investigate membrane fusion during synaptic transmission (top), Rothman, Pincet, and colleagues designed an artificial version of the event. They exposed lipid nanodiscs embedded with SNARE proteins to vesicles containing complementary SNARE proteins. Only one SNARE protein complex was required for fusion between the discs and vesicles (A), but three were necessary to create a stable pore to release the neurotransmitter contained within the vesicle (B).