PPT on Blue Brain Technology

1. DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS & COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING
2015 - 2016
A Technical Seminar On
“BLUE BRAIN TECHNOLOGY”
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2. CONTENTS
 INTRODUCTION
 BLUE BRAIN
 FUNTIONING OF BLUE BRAIN
 HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
 STEPS TO BUILD A VIRTUAL BRAIN
 SUPERCOMPUTERS
 ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES
 CONCLUSION
 REFERENCES
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3. INTRODUCTION
 HUMAN BRAIN
− The human brain is the command center for the human nervous
system.
− The brain makes up to 2% of a human’s body weight, where
the cerebrum makes the 85% of the brain’s weight.
 The Cerebrum
− The cerebral cortex is divided into 4
sections called ‘Lobes’
- Frontal lobe
- Parietal lobe
- Occipital lobe
- Temporal lobe
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4. − The cerebrum contains about 86 billion nerve cells
neurons(gray matter),axons and dendrites(white matter).
− The neurons are connected by trillions of connections called
synapses.
 Synapses
− It is a structure that permits a neuron (or nerve cell) to pass an
electrical or chemical signal to another neuron.
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Contd…..

5.  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
− AI is the intelligence exhibited by machines or software.
− It is at one end concerned with thought processes and
reasoning, whereas at the other end it is concerned with the
behaviour.
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Contd…..

6.  NANOBOTS
− Nanorobotics is the emerging technology field creating
machines or robots whose components are at or close to the
scale of a nanometre (10−9 meters).
− The devices ranges in size from 0.1–10 micrometres and
constructed of nanoscale or molecular components.
− Common medical applications of nanobots are, for surgical
instrumentation, diagnosis and drug delivery.
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Contd…..

7. 7
Contd…..
Neuroscience
Artificial Intelligence Nanobots
BLUE BRAIN
TECHNOLOGY

8. BLUE BRAIN
− “BLUE BRAIN “-Creating a virtual human brain inside a
supercomputer.
− It is an attempt to reverse engineer the human brain and
recreate it at the cellular level inside a computer simulation.
− Founded in May 2005 by Henry Markram at EPFL in
Lausanne, Switzerland.
− GOALS:
 To gain complete understanding of the brain.
 To enable better and faster development of brain disease
treatment.
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9. FUNTIONING OF BLUE BRAIN
 Smaller robots known as nanobots are used.
 They will provide an interface with computers.
 Thus data stored in brain will be uploaded to computer.
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10. HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE
REQUIREMENTS
 Processor with a very high processing power.
 Linux and c++ software.
 Large memory with high storage capacity.
 Very powerful Nanobots to act as the interface between
the natural brain and computer.
 A Super computer(Blue Gene).
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11. STEPS TO BUILD A VIRTUAL BRAIN
 There are 3 main steps to build the virtual brain:
− Data Acquisition
− Simulation
− Visualisation of results
 DATA ACQUISITION
It involves taking brain slices, placing them under a
microscope, and measuring the shape and electrical activity of
individual neuron.
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12.  SIMULATION
− The primary software used by the BBP for neural simulations is
a package called NEURON.
− The simulation step involves synthesising virtual cells using
the algorithms that were found to describe real neurons. The
algorithms and parameters are adjusted for the age, species, and
disease stage of the animal being simulated.
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Contd….
Fig. : Neuron cell builder simulation.

13.  VISUALISATION OF RESULTS
− RT Neuron is the primary application for visualisation of neural
simulations.
− RT Neuron takes the output from simulations in NEURON and
renders them in 3D.
− This allows researchers to watch as activation potentials
propagate through a neuron and between neurons.
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Contd….
Fig.: Visualization of RT neuron.

14. SUPERCOMPUTERS
Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing
supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the
PFLOPS(petaFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.
Generations of supercomputers:
− Blue Gene/P
− JuQUEEN
− DEEP(Dynamical Exascale supercomputer)
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15. BLUE GENE/P
 The machine is installed on the EPFL campus in Lausanne and
is managed by CADMOS (Centre for Advanced Modelling
Science).
 The brain simulations generally ran all day, and one day per
week (usually Thursdays). The rest of the week was used to
prepare simulations and to analyze the resulting data.
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16. Blue Gene/P technical specifications:
 4,096 quad-core nodes (16,384 cores in total).
 Total: 56 teraflops, 16 terabytes of memory.
 4 racks, one row, wired as a 16x16x16 3D.
 1 PB of disk space, GPFS (General parallel file system).
 Operating system: Linux.
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17. JuQUEEN
 JuQUEEN is an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer that was
installed in Germany in May 2012.
 It performed at 1.6 petaflops and was ranked the world’s 8th
fastest supercomputer in June 2012.
 This aims to develop a three-dimensional, realistic model of
the human brain.
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18. ADVANTAGES
 Even after the death the person’s intelligence can be used.
 The activity of different animals can be understood. Which
means by interpretation of the electric impulses from the brain
of the animals, their thinking can be understood easily.
 Diseases like Alzheimer, Parkinson’s can be treated.
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19. DISADVANTAGES
 Due to blue brain system human beings will become dependent
on the computer systems.
 Technical knowledge may be misused.
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20. CONCLUSION
 Human beings will be able to transfer themselves into
computers at some point. Also, it is the combination of
biological and digital technologies.
 Using the Blue Gene supercomputers, up to 100 cortical
columns, 1 million neurons, and 1 billion synapses can be
simulated at once. This is roughly equivalent to the brain power
of a honey bee.
 Humans, by contrast, have about 2 million columns in their
cortices. Despite with such a complexity, it is predicted that the
project will be capable of this, by the year 2023.
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21. REFERENCES
 "Blue Brain Technology: The Future Generation", Priya Babel
Research journal of computer and information technology
sciences, Vol. 3(2), 1-5, May (2015)
 "Blue Brain Technology: A sub way to Artificial Intelligence",
2014 Fourth international conference on communication
systems and network technologies.
 www.gripinit.com/2015/03/18/blue-brain-human-brain-in-a-
supercomputer/
 www.slideshare.net
 www.research.ibm.com/bluebrain
 www.bluebrainproject.epfl.ch
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22. Dept.of ECE,SaIT 22