A novel parallel hardware and software solution for a large-scale biologically realistic cortical simulation

This research addresses a major gap in our conceptual understanding of synaptic and brain-like network dynamics. Over the course of several years we have designed and implemented increasingly complex and powerful brain-like simulators which apply recent advances in computer and networking technology towards the goal of understanding brain function in terms of pulse-coded information networks. These simulations have been run on increasingly powerful clusters of computers. Currently we have a cluster of 128 processors with a total of 256 GB of RAM and more than a Terabyte of disk storage, interconnected with a Myrinet 2000 highspeed/low-latency interconnection network. On this cluster we are able to run simulations on the order of 3 million synapses per processor, with the capability of receiving stimulus input from remote devices.