Brain Simulation
The restructured work of the European Human Brain Project was recently showcased to the public, with the research to date being made available to the wider scientific community. While the project aims of fully simulating a human brain have been scaled back, it continues to represent an important focus for neuroscience and brain-inspired computation.
Understanding the human brain is one of the greatest challenges facing 21st century science. If we can rise to the challenge, we can gain profound insights into what makes us human, develop new treatments for brain disease and build revolutionary new computing technologies
The Human Brain Project (HBP) is a EU-funded initiative to create and operate a research infrastructure, to help advance neuroscience, medicine and computing. The 10-year Project began in 2013 and involves leading scientists at more than 100 universities and research centres across Europe, China, Japan the USA, including the Allen Brain Institute.
The project is centred on six platforms including:
- The Neuroinformatics Platform: registration, search, analysis of neuroscience data.
- The Brain Simulation Platform: reconstruction and simulation of the brain.
- The High Performance Computing Platform: computing and storage facilities to run complex simulations and analyse large data sets.
- The Medical Informatics Platform: searching of real patient data to understand similarities and differences among brain diseases.
- The Neuromorphic Computing Platform: access to computer systems that emulate brain microcircuits and apply principles similar to the way the brain learns.
- The Neurorobotics Platform: testing of virtual models of the brain by connecting them to simulated robot bodies and environments.
After the project was started in 2013 with Henry Markram in charge of a whopping $1.3 billion Euro budget, there were some organizational issues. The project is now more focused on data tools and software that are not exclusively aimed at simulating the brain. It has also undergone a large scale review and restructuring.
Despite the difficulties, the Human Brain Project has announced the release of initial versions of its six Information and Communications Technology (ICT) platforms to users outside the Project. These platforms are designed to help the scientific community to accelerate progress in neuroscience, medicine, and computing.
The platforms released this week consist of prototype hardware, software tools, databases and programming interfaces, which will be refined and expanded in a collaborative approach with users.
The first version of the Brain Simulation Platform is being built for release at the end of the Ramp-Up Phase. This effort builds on previous work in the Blue Brain Project.
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The brain simulation will provide researchers with an internet accessible Brain Simulation “Cockpit”, allowing them to perform experiments in silico. This will involve investigating the relationships between different levels of biological organisation in the healthy and the diseased brain and preparing the way for the re-implementation of neuronal circuits in neuromorphic hardware.The neuromorphic computing platform intends to release two different neuromorphic computing prototypes as part of the ramp-up. The two systems being constructed are key computing resources for the HBP. One cluster is features 128 Intel i7-2600 cores with a total Linpack benchmark performance of 3.2 Teraflops for computation.
The cluster is being optimised for efficient communication with the other systems and includes 32 I7-nodes dedicated to operating the highspeed links to individual wafers for closed-loop virtual robotics experiments. Users will access the Platform via a single point of access web portal shared among all the platforms.
Karlheinz Meier, Co-leader of the Neuromorphic Platform, said, “The HBP invites scientists everywhere to work with our prototype Platforms and give us their feedback. This will help us improve their functionality and ease of use, and hence their value to society.”
The platforms are designed to help researchers to advance faster and more efficiently, by sharing data and results, and exploiting advanced capabilities. The platforms should enable closer collaboration between scientists to create more detailed models and simulations of the brain.
Since the US launched its own BRAIN Initiative, the restructuring of the European initiative has also been repositioned to avoid research overlap and hopefully will accelerate this important area of research.
The videos below provide further detail on some of the platform project work undertaken for the HBP so far.
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