Faculty Mentor:
Ms. Ankita Sharma
Student Name:
Neha Goel (MCA-II)
Vijay Kumar (MCA-II)
1. INTRODUCTION
The most creative innovation of god is human and human`s best part us the "Brain" brain is the only thing which makes a human work smartly, take decisions , remember things and many more. But what about all the knowledge that a human have after a human is dead. All its knowledge is gone with them. This may cause a huge loss in many situations, for example:-scientists, doctors, researchers, etc. So, here comes the solution to this problem. IBM thought about it and developed the first ever virtual brain – “BLUE BRAIN”.
Fig 1: Human Brain
2. Blue Brain
If we try to understand in layman language about blue brain we can say that it is an attempt of creating a photocopy of human brain so that it functions exactly in the same way as a human brain. It was established in MAY 2005 by Henry Markram at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The research of developing this artificial brain i.e. The Blue Brain involves the study of slices of living brain tissue using the microscopes and the patch clamp electrodes. Observations of this study was used for building biologically realistic models of neurons and network of neurons in the cerebral cortex. A supercomputer built by IBM called Blue Gene was used to carry out these simulations. And this result in the name “BLUE BRAIN”.
3. Functioning of Brain
Nervous System: It is the most complicated organized electron mechanism which we cannot see from our eyes but it performs very crucial tasks in our body via electrical pulses.
There are 3 simple functions that are performed by brain that are:-
3.1 Sensory Input
When anything is stored in brain through senses or from the surrounding then it is called sensory input. Any reaction given by our body when we touch anything warm/cold the message is passed to our brain through sensory cells called neurons.
3.2 Integration
The explanation of things that we feel by our sensory cells comes under this part of function. This is done by the part where number of neurons are present which contribute in understanding the situation.
3.3 Motor Output
Once the interpretation or explanation is done of the things that we have stored in our brain through sensory cells, muscle cells or gland cells will respond on the request made and act accordingly.
4. Simulation
4.1 NEURON
The software used by BBP for neural simulations is a package named NEURON. Its development started in 1990s by Michael Hines at Yale University and John Moore at Duke University. This software is written using languages like: C, C++ and FORTRAN. The development of the software didn’t stop there and was in continuous development and as of July 2012, its latest version is 7.2.
Fig 2: NEURON Cell Builder Window
4.2 SIMULATION SPEED
The simulation of one cortical column in 2012 run at approx. 300 x slower than real time speed. Five minutes were required to complete one second of simulated time. The simulations show approximately linear scaling - that is, doubling the size of the neural network doubles the time it takes to simulate. Currently the main goal rather than performance is biological validity. Once it is determined that which factors are biologically important for a given effect all other factors will be trimmed which will result in improvement of performance.
The simulation times for the numerical integrations is 0.025 ms and the time for writing the output to disk is 0.1 ms.
5. Blue Gene
The machine used for developing this virtual brain was Blue Gene supercomputer built by IBM and this was the ground reason behind the name of virtual brain. The simulations of brain used to run all day, and one day per week.
Technical specifications of Blue Gene /P:
1. 4,096 quad-core nodes
2. Each core is PowerPC 450, 850 MHz
3. Operating system: Linux SuSE SLES 10
4. Total: 56 teraflops, 16 terabytes of memory
5. 1 PB of disk space, GPFS parallel file system
6. Public front end:bluegene.epfl.ch and processing log
Fig 3: Blue Gene
6. Natural Brain vs. Simulated Brain
Fig 4: Simulated Brain
7. Advantages
7.1 Memorise things without any extra efforts.
7.2 It acts as an interface between animals and human being by understanding the activities of animals.
7.3 In the absence of a person it can take decisions by using the knowledge of that person.
7.4 Performs all important functions as that of an intelligent machine.
7.5 Using the knowledge of the person even after the death of human being.
7.6 It allow the deaf to hear via direct nerve simulation, and also be helpful for curing many psychological diseases.
Fig 5: Blue Brain
8. Disadvantages
8.1 It becomes a source on which human gets dependent.
8.2 Misuse of knowledge stored in human brain.
8.3 Virus in computer system will result in an increasingly critical threat.
8.4 In any case if the memory is lost retrieving back the memory is very expensive task.
8.5 Another fear is found with respect to human cloning.
9. References:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project
2. https://bluebrain.epfl.ch/page-56882-en.html
3. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/334/6057/748
4. https://translationjournal.net/April-2017/blue-brain-a-massive-storage-space.html
5. SUPER CHARGE YOUR BRAIN by Dr. David Jockers