At the SC09 supercomputing conference in Portland, Orelando, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM Wednesday announced the so-called “Blue Matter” – a landmark software platform for neuroscience modeling.

Presenting their ‘cognitive computing’-related paper at the conference, the researchers, from five universities and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, described their extraordinarily analogous cortical simulator, C2, which they claim can simulate a brain with nearly 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain.

Noting that the brain is almost the equivalent of a cat’s brain capacity, the researchers elaborated that the brain had been simulated with 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses, after teaming up archived magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan data and bringing it together on a Blue Gene P Supercomputer.

Commenting on the development, Dharmendra Modha - IBM’s head of the project – said: “This is a tool of unprecedented scale. It allows us to probe deeper into how the brain works and how we could build something like it, and it could lead to new dynamics for computing that we've been pursuing for more than 60 years.”

The singular project, which received a $20-million part funding from the research wing of the Department of Defense, essentially aimed at mining the brain for tricks that could be used to ape its cognitive abilities and its ultra-low energy use in chips and software of the future.