The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Cortical Simulations With 109 Neurons, 1013 Synapses

In the quest for cognitive computing, the authors have built a massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, which incorporates a number of innovations in computation, memory, and communication. Using C2 on LLNL's Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer with 147; 456 CPUs and 144 TB of main memory, the authors report two cortical simulations at unprecedented scale that effectively saturate the entire memory capacity and refresh it at least every simulated second. The rest simulation consists of 1:6 billion neurons and 8:87 trillion synapses with experimentally-measured gray matter thala-mocortical connectivity. The second simulation has 900 million neurons and 9 trillion synapses with probabilistic connectivity.