IBM / DARPA SyNAPSE announce new brain simulation
By the end of 2009, IBM has announced the development of a brain simulation (machine simulation of cognitive activities) that approximates the complexity of a cat brain.


The paper “The Cat is Out of the Bag” was presented at the Supercomputing 2009 conference in Portland, Oregon, and was awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize.
The cat brain has 15 times as many neurons as a rat and 50 times as many as a mouse. The cat has 13 times as many synapses as a rat and and 35 times as many synapses as a mouse. IBM simulated a model with 0.9 * 10^9 neurons and 0.9 * 10^13 synapses, using probabilistic connectivity and a simulation time step of 1 ms, only 83 times slower than real-time per Hertz of average neuronal ring rate. The new simulations are 4.5% of the size of human cortex simulations.
You may find details on the project here and a relative review presented on IEEE’s Spectrum here.

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