Harnessing the muscle of one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, researchers have built one of the largest and most detailed biophysically realistic brain simulations of an animal ever. This virtual copy of a whole mouse cortex allows researchers to study the brain in a new way: simulating diseases like Alzheimer’s or epilepsy in the virtual world to watch in detail how damage spreads throughout neural networks or understanding cognition and consciousness. It simulates both form and function, with almost ten million neurons, 26 billion synapses, and 86 interconnected brain regions.
This spectacular achievement is the product of Fugaku, the Japanese flagship supercomputer that can crunch data faster than we can blink, with quadrillions of calculations per second. Scientists at the Allen Institute and Tadashi Yamazaki, Ph.D., from Japan’s University of Electro-Communications led the project in collaboration with researchers from the Research Organization for Information Science and Technology (RIST), Yamaguchi University, and RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS). An upcoming paper will unveil the accomplishment at SC25, the world’s premier supercomputing conference taking place in mid-November.
