{"id":168699,"date":"2021-02-02T16:37:44","date_gmt":"2021-02-03T00:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nextbigfuture.com\/?p=168699"},"modified":"2021-02-02T16:37:44","modified_gmt":"2021-02-03T00:37:44","slug":"desktop-gpus-simulate-24-billion-synapse-mammal-brain-cortex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nextbigfuture.com\/2021\/02\/desktop-gpus-simulate-24-billion-synapse-mammal-brain-cortex.html","title":{"rendered":"Desktop GPUs Simulate 24 Billion Synapse Mammal Brain Cortex"},"content":{"rendered":"
Dr James Knight and Prof Thomas Nowotny from the University of Sussex\u2019s School of Engineering and Informatics used<\/a> the latest Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) to give a single desktop PC the capacity to simulate brain models of almost unlimited size. This work will make large brain simulations accessible to researchers with tiny budgets.<\/p>\n The research builds on the pioneering work of US researcher Eugene Izhikevich who pioneered a similar method for large-scale brain simulation in 2006.<\/p>\n The researchers applied Izhikevich\u2019s technique to a modern GPU, with approximately 2,000 times the computing power available 15 years ago, to create a cutting-edge model of a Macaque\u2019s visual cortex (with 4.1 million neurons and 24.2 billion synapses) which previously could only be simulated on a supercomputer.<\/p>\n The researchers\u2019 GPU accelerated spiking neural network simulator uses the large amount of computational power available on a GPU to \u2018procedurally\u2019 generate connectivity and synaptic weights \u2018on the go\u2019 as spikes are triggered – removing the need to store connectivity data in memory.<\/p>\n Initialization of the researchers\u2019 model took six minutes and simulation of each biological second took 7.7 min in the ground state and 8.4 min in the resting state\u2013 up to 35 % less time than a previous supercomputer simulation. In 2018, one rack of an IBM Blue Gene\/Q supercomputer initialization of the model took around five minutes and simulating one second of biological time took approximately 12 minutes.<\/p>\n Prof Nowotny, Professor of Informatics at the University of Sussex, said: \u201cLarge-scale simulations of spiking neural network models are an important tool for improving our understanding of the dynamics and ultimately the function of brains. However, even small mammals such as mice have on the order of 1 trillion synaptic connections meaning that simulations require several terabytes of data \u2013 an unrealistic memory requirement for a single desktop machine.<\/p>\n