Blue Brain is a project to begin the construction of a simulated brain. The aim is not the creation of artificial intelligence, but rather the detailed study of the brain's structure. Started in May 2005, the project is a collaboration between IBM and Henry Markram's Brain and Mind Institute at the École Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland. A computer simulation or a computer model is a computer program that attempts to simulate an abstract model of a particular system. ... Comparative brain sizes In animals, the brain, or encephalon (Greek for in the head), is the control center of the central nervous system. ... Hondas intelligent humanoid robot AI redirects here. ... Big Blue redirects here. ... The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne in Switzerland. ... Lausanne is a city in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, situated on the shores of Lake Geneva (French: Lac Léman), and facing Évian-les-Bains (France) and with the Jura hills to its north. ...

The initial goal of the project is the simulation of a neocortical column, which can be considered the smallest functional unit of the neocortex (the part of the brain thought to be responsible for higher functions such as conscious thought). Such a column is about 2 mm tall, has a diameter of 0.5 mm and contains about 60,000 neurons in humans; the simulation will focus on rat neocortical columns, which are very similar in structure but contain only 10,000 neurons (and 10⁸ synapses). Over the last 10 years, Markram has mapped the types of neurons and their connections in such a column. A cortical column is a group of neurons in the brain cortex which can be successively penetrated by a probe inserted perpendicularly to the cortical surface, and which have nearly identical receptive fields. ... The neocortex (Latin for new bark or new rind) is a part of the brain of mammals. ... Drawing by Santiago Ramón y Cajal of cells in the pigeon cerebellum. ... Binomial name Rattus norvegicus (Berkenhout, 1769) The Brown Rat or Norway Rat (Rattus norvegicus) is one of the best-known and common rats, and also one of the largest. ... Illustration of the major elements in a prototypical synapse. ...

The project will use a Blue Gene supercomputer, running as simulating software the MPI-based Neocortical Simulator (NCS) developed by Phil Goodman, to be combined with Michael Hines' NEURON software. The simulation will not consist of a mere artificial neural network, but will involve much more biologically realistic models of neurons. Blue Gene/L Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several next-generation supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the petaflops range, and currently reaching speeds over 280 teraflops (sustained). ... A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. ... The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a computer communications protocol. ... An artificial neural network (ANN), also called a simulated neural network (SNN) or commonly just neural network (NN) is an interconnected group of artificial neurons that uses a mathematical or computational model for information processing based on a connectionist approach to computation. ...

It is estimated that construction of a simulated neocortical column will take about 2 years; the results of the simulation will be experimentally tested against biological columns.

After that, the project will develop in two different directions:

1. construction of a simulation on the molecular level, which is desirable since it allows to study effects of gene expression
2. simplification of the column simulation to allow for parallel simulation of large numbers of connected columns, with the grand goal of simulating a whole neocortex (which in humans consists of about 1 million cortical columns)

Gene expression, also called protein expression or often simply expression is the process by which a genes DNA sequence is converted into the structures and functions of a cell. ...

See also

• CCortex, another brain simulation under construction

CCortexâ„¢ is planned to be a complete 20-billion neuron simulation of the Human Cortex and peripheral systems, on a cluster of 500 computers - the largest neural network created to date. ...

Sources

• IBM Aims To Simulate A Brain, Forbes, 6 June 2005
• Mission to build a simulated brain begins, New Scientist News, 6 June 2005
• Brain and Mind Institute, Lausanne
• FAQ on Blue Brain
• NCS documentation
• NEURON documentation
• Henry Markram, "The Blue Brain Project", Nature Neuroscience Review, 7:153-160, 2006 February. PMID 16429124.