IBM Research has reached a milestone in the field of cognitive computing in collaboration with DARPA’s cognitive computing program, called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics or SyNAPSE
IBM’s TrueNorth system, running on the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LBNL) Blue Gene/Q Sequoia supercomputer, has managed a brain simulation of 2.084 billion neurosynaptic cores, which works out to 530 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses simulated. This was done at a fraction of the speed that an actual brain would be able to function but even being “only 1542 times slower than real time” is still an impressive feat.
IBM has made a point of saying that they have not “built a biologically realistic simulation of the complete human brain”. Instead they have “simulated a novel modular, scalable, non-von-Neumann, ultra-low power, cognitive computing architecture” which still has a way to go before it can analyse and act on information from multiple sources in real-time.
