4000 Processor Supercomputer used to simulate half a mouse brain

Three researchers at IBM's Almaden Research lab and the University of Nevada simulated half of a mouse brain on an IBM BlueGene L supercomputer with 4,096 processors. The simulation consisted of about eight million neurons with up to 8,000 synapses each. They were able to simulate the 'half-brain' for ten seconds at a tenth normal speed, for a complete second of simulated brain activity.

The researchers claim that they were able to see the 'neurons' firing in ways similar to that seen in nature and that the neurons also grouped in biologically plausible ways.

For future tests, the team aims to speed up the simulation, make it more biologically faithful, and perform more detailed analysis. This is very interesting research, because anyone can see that with enough computing power, it will one day be possible to model the human brain, and what kind of results will we see then?