"K" Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of brain activity

[SchrodingersCat_]

Original Article: here

This is incredibly fascinating. A brain, which runs on something like 20 watts equivalent of electricity, is orders of magnitude faster than a supercomputer with 82,944 processors, 8.162 petaflops of performance, capable of 1,016 billion operations per second, has 663,552 cores and uses 12.6 Megawatts (12,600,000 watts) (Source: TweakTown and Wikipedia)

What "K" simulated: 1.73 Billion Neurons, connected to 10.4 Trillion Synapses, each synapse containing 24 bytes of data.
What is actually in the brain: ~86-100 Billion Neurons and 1 Quadrillion synapses in a child, and between 100 and 500 trillion synapses in an adult.

Fun fact: Some people calculate that the data storage capacity of the human brain is between 2.5 and 5 petabytes, that is equivalent to between 2,500 and 5,000 1TB hard drives! All stored in your brain!

The brain packs quite an incredible punch for such a small, lightweight (~3lbs), and energy efficient unit that can run on Cheetos and Mountain Dew. It is like the De Lorean from Back to the Future, just add organic matter!

Here is an interesting calculation for you, 40 minutes = 2,400 seconds, so I suppose that our brains are 2,400x more powerful than the "K" supercomputer. The supercomputer uses 12.6MW, so I calculated that if you had enough "K" supercomputers to equal the brain (you would need roughly 2,400 of them), the brain would be 1,512,000,000x more power efficient than the "K" supercomputer.

 

 

Very rough Bitcoin mining calculations:

Imagine trying to mine bitcoin with your brain. You instantly win the internets.

I did some research and some people here said that each core of the CPU's used in the "K" supercomputer would be capable of 327 Khash on SHA-256-based coins. So 327x8=2616 Khash per CPU (SPARC64 VIIIfx), and there are 82,944 CPUs. So the extremely rough average hashrate of the "K" supercomputer is 216981504 Khash, or roughly 216 GHash (Remember that this is CPU, not GPU mining). Multiply that by 2,400 (how many times more powerful the brain is over the supercomputer) and you get 520.75 Thash/s. So IN THEORY the brain is at least capable of 520.75Thash/s of bitcoin mining. Assuming that Scrypt coin mining is roughly 10% as fast as SHA-256 mining, the brain would be capable of 52.075 Thash/s of scrypt mining. With that kind of power, using your brain, in theory, you could mine $135,663.96 of bitcoins per day, running on only 20 watts, but according to CoinWars, if you were mining the most profitable coin you could, you could make upwards of $500,000 per day.

 

Disclaimer: These calculations are EXTREMELY rough, and are not to be taken literally. I am not responsible for that one guy who tries to upload cgminer to his brain which fails and then goes into a coma for the rest of his life.

Calculated using this link.

 

 

The bottom line is, if your brain were a graphics card, it would, in fact, be able to play Crysis

[TheNinjaNextDor]

Humans are like free super computers! But really that's pretty cool. I just want to know what the computer looked like and cost to build.

[Cwazywazy]

How powerful is a cow brain? We eat cows, could we use their brains to play BF4 too? Maybe use them as giant HDDs for 4k movies?

 

EDIT: If we could do this, I wonder what would happen if we poured beer all over the brain or gave it acid or something.

[AlwaysFSX]

Mine would have artifacting with Crysis

[qwertywarrior]

pfft i can simulate a human brain in 3 seconds

[DGPC]

I REALLY hope nobody tries to fit a brain inside a PCIe express slot. Might make a nice horror movie.

[Ultimate_PIMP]

And people think humans were formed by chance...

[jukki]

And people think humans were formed by chance...

Doing biology course about genes rught now. It is interesting how complex we are. Example DNA that is universal for all living things. Makes you definetly question if it was all by just change.

[Ineko]

And people think humans were formed by chance...

 

Nice try at shoehorning god into there buddy.

 

Get out.

[James_AJ]

...and why am I still so dumb

[cDNA]

Imagine trying to mine bitcoin with your brain. You instantly win the internets.

[Beskamir]

So why don't they link together a bunch of brains grown in a lab and use that as their super computer? (I'd make a great mad scientist)

[Dragonzeanse]

Crysis is small pickings for my brain.

 

I want to do 4K.

[ionbasa]

I'm not sure why there continues to be a comparison between the human brain and something that that designs and builds. As long as we keep building computers they will never get ahead of us. We program them, do the number's and all that. Even if we had robots doing it, we would still have to design and program those robots. Nonetheless though a very very interesting and open minded thread OP.

What about when we have autonomous learning / deep machine learning.

[Testmann]

It's not like you can say that we are much more powerful than the computer. Emulation - especially with something so different - is far harder than running on the "dedicated hardware" that the brain is. These are two things made for far different kinds of thinking.

[That Norwegian Guy]

How powerful is a cow brain? We eat cows, could we use their brains to play BF4 too? Maybe use them as giant HDDs for 4k movies?

 

EDIT: If we could do this, I wonder what would happen if we poured beer all over the brain or gave it acid or something.

 

Pig brains are bigger. Don't know how well they overclock though

[qwertywarrior]

So why don't they link together a bunch of brains grown in a lab and use that as their super computer? (I'd make a great mad scientist)

you have just reminded me of Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 13

 

watch 16:27 to 20:08

http://animewaffles.tv/iPod-Neon-Genesis-Evangelion-Episode-13-English-Subbed-25600

[ionbasa]

Wouldn't we have to design that first? I mean design the software to allow that? I dunno, I just can't see it happening by itself. Everything we have has had to be designed and built by us. We have had to mine the minerals and plastics so we could develop technology. Could be totally wrong though 

Well if you emulate something like an entire brain, there is nothing preventing it from learning or doing anything else a normal brain would do. Especially if we "cloned" a donors dna, and made a digital copy. technically they should operate the same way.

 

Also your argument is interesting in that it parallels another argument: the simulation hypothesis.

 

How can we tell if we are real and not a simulation of something else? Scientist are debating this out using String theory/m-theory/10-dimensions theory (whatever you want to call it). Basically the premise is: We can directly interact with 3 dimensions + time, and we can also draw/simulate in 3d/2d/1d. But not anything greater than 3 dimensions +time.

 

Since there are technically 10 dimensions, what if we are actually a 3d simulation in a 10d 'world'.

 

Also:

 

and: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-credence-theory-universe-hologram.html

 

so why couldn't computers learn if anything is possible. 

[Ineko]

The brain is a pretty complex structure, even if we did emulate it we still had to do that..the computer didn't emulate it itself you know what I mean? So we are still a step ahead of it. We know more about our entire planet than we do about the brain. Its like parking your car on the street and suddenly it starts up by itself and drives itself around the block. If a computer now days could just spontaneously start to think on its own without us having to get the wheels going in the first place, than the argument about computer emulated brains is plausible. 

 

There's a lot more to the entire thing than simple analogies. 

 

I don't think anyone on this forum is qualified to say whether or not this would ever be possible, there's so much intricate science/physics/knowledge of the brain itself etc. involved it's insane.

[Titanicium]

I REALLY hope nobody tries to fit a brain inside a PCIe express slot. Might make a nice horror movie.

 

Just think about the massive bottleneck We would need something like PCI-E 30 1280000X

 

Anyway OP: It's very interesting to see these results, but meanwhile we have to remember that humans can actually normally only use around 10% of their brain at one time. Which means that this is a measure of brainpower we can't use

 

Disclaimer: I might be wrong so if anyone would like to object then please do

[Yoinkerman]

In 40,000 years if computers aren't as powerful as the human brain is now (barring mass extinction) I'd say you were right.

 

And people think humans were formed by chance...

[Ineko]

In 40,000 years if computers aren't as powerful as the human brain is now (barring mass extinction) I'd say you were right.

 

Well if current computers can reproduce 1 second of brain activity in 40 minutes imagine what they could do in a few hundred years? Look how far we've come just over the past 10 years. It's crazy to think what we might be able to do with computers in the future.

[Puppet]

People laughed, some even got angry when I decided to hold people against their will in my basement.

 

Now I have the worlds most powerful supercomputer... Who's laughing now?

[AlexGoesHigh]

i dunno about this i mean computers essentially run by doing math operations and AFAIK a smartphone can calculate like millions of times faster a simple division compared to us. but at the same time robots are light years stupid compared to us. i guess we shouldn't compare them in the first place 

[Nineshadow]

Now we can use our brains to store 4k porn!