- Researchers at the University of Manchester in England have completed construction of the world’s largest supercomputer designed to work in the same way as the human brain.
- It is “SpiNNaker” (Spiking Neural Network Architecture) supercomputer. It can simulate the internal workings of up to a billion neurons through a whopping one million processing units.
- Built by the University of Manchester, the SpiNNaker machine is made up of one million processors capable of 200 trillion actions per second – meaning it can model more biological neurons in real time than any other machine ever built.
- Unlike traditional computers, it does not communicate by sending large amounts of information from point A to point B via a standard network. Instead, it mimics the parallel communication architecture of the brain by sending small amounts of information to different destinations simultaneously.
- The SpiNNaker is the first step towards creating a model of a billion biological neurons in real time, although even in its current state it will provide unprecedented insight into how the human brain works.
- It will do this by running large-scale, real-time simulations of various regions of the brain, such as the Basal Ganglia – an area affected in Parkinson’s disease. (Published on Independent)
