IBM's Latest Miracle

This column does not have a single author, but is submitted by a number of experts that contribute regularly to our news source.  Some are in Canada, some in the UK and one is in the far east

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IBM Research announced an interesting breakthrough this week.  They have been able to model a cat's brain. 

"IBM has simulated a brain with 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses--about the equivalent of a cat's cortex, or 4.5% of a human brain."

There is a difference between modeling a Cat's brain and mimicking it, however.

 What's the difference?

The fantastic tool that IBM has developed allows researchers to dig deeper into the operation of the brain.  Little is really known about how brains work and this will allow key researchers to find out hitherto unknown secrets.

This may lead some day to a robot cat or human-like brain that really performs like the real ones.

They want to do more than model, they want to create something that does things with all the power of super computers behind them.

The computers being used and the tasks accomplished would take a modern desktop computer thousands of years.  This type of computer can process streams of data at the same time and work in parallel on tasks This will lead useful  robots that have real meaning.

21/11/2009 11:41 PM

IBM's Blue Matter model will run on a Blue Gene supercomputer that uses more than 144 terabytes of memory and a cluster of around 150,000 processors, capable of about  500 trillion floating point operations a second. At that rate, it could perform in about eight hours the same work that would take a typical Intel powered laptop around 500 years.

The memory on the IBM set of processors is immense.  It uses 144 terabytes of real memory as opposed to disk storage and a cluster of 150,000 processors capable of 500 million floating point operations per second.

It will take years of research with machines like this and bigger to reach the 'useful robot