Blue Brain

The Blue Brain, a Swiss national brain initiative, aims to create a digital reconstruction of the brain by reverse-engineering mammalian brain circuitry. The mission of the project, founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, is to use biologically-detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mammalian brain to identify the fundamental principles of brain structure and function in health and disease.

The project is headed by the founding director Henry Markram, who also heads the European Human Brain Project, and co-directed by Felix Schürmann and Sean Hill. Using a Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines's NEURON software, the simulation does not consist simply of an artificial neural network, but involves a biologically realistic model of neurons. It is hoped that it will eventually shed light on the nature of consciousness.

There are a number of sub-projects, including the Cajal Blue Brain, coordinated by the Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid (CeSViMa), and others run by universities and independent laboratories.

The initial goal of the project, completed in December 2006, was the simulation of a rat neocortical column, which is considered by some researchers to be the smallest functional unit of the neocortex (the part of the brain thought to be responsible for higher functions such as conscious thought). In humans, each column is about 2 mm in length, has a diameter of 0.5 mm and contains about 60,000neurons; rat neocortical columns are very similar in structure but contain only 10,000 neurons (and 10⁸synapses). Between 1995 and 2005, Markram mapped the types of neurons and their connections in such a column.

...
Wikipedia