IBM a step closer to computer that beats brain

PORTLAND, USA: IBM said today at SC 09, the supercomputing conference, that it has made significant progress toward making a computer that simulates and emulates the brain’s abilities to sense, perceive, interact, and recognize, while rivaling the brain’s low power and energy consumption and compact size.

The cognitive computing team, led by IBM Research, has achieved significant advances in large-scale cortical simulation and a new algorithm that synthesizes neurological data, two major milestones that indicate the feasibility of building a cognitive computing chip, it said in a press release.

IBM is hopeful of giving a final shape to such a computer in a decade's time, according to reports.

Scientists at IBM Research - Almaden, in collaboration with colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, have performed the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex and contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses, it added.

Additionally, in collaboration with researchers from Stanford University, IBM scientists have developed an algorithm that exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture in order to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging.

Mapping the wiring diagram of the brain is crucial to untangling its vast communication network and understanding how it represents and processes information.

IBM said these advancements will provide a unique workbench for exploring the computational dynamics of the brain, and stand to move the team closer to its goal of building a compact, low-power synaptronic chip using nanotechnology and advances in phase change memory and magnetic tunnel junctions.

“Learning from the brain is an attractive way to overcome power and density challenges faced in computing today,” said Josephine Cheng, IBM Fellow and lab director of IBM Research - Almaden.

“As the digital and physical worlds continue to merge and computing becomes more embedded in the fabric of our daily lives, it’s imperative that we create a more intelligent computing system that can help us make sense the vast amount of information that's increasingly available to us, much the way our brains can quickly interpret and act on complex tasks.”

To perform the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceed the scale of the cat cortex, the team built a cortical simulator that incorporates a number of innovations in computation, memory, and communication as well as sophisticated biological details from neurophysiology and neuroanatomy, the release added.