How Powerful Is Your Mind?

How powerful is your mind?

A Supercomputer in Japan has cracked the code of the human brain by mapping one second of one percent of human brain activity. It might not seem impressive but it's an important breakthrough in stimulation technology. Using the forth most powerful computer in the world known as K supercomputer, scientists have replicated the network of 1.73 Billion nerve cells and 10.4 trillion synapses. K computer used over 700,000 processor cores and 1.4 million GB of RAM, to model the data in 40 minutes.  

The K computer is based on a distributed memory architecture with over 80,000 computer nodes.

It is used for a variety of applications, including climate research, disaster prevention and medical  research. The K computer's operating system is based on the Linux Kernel, with additional drivers designed to make use of the computer's hardware. In June 2011, K was ranked the world's fastest supercomputer, with a computation speed of over 8 petaflops, and in November 2011, K became the first computer to top 10 petaflops.

Its the most sophisticated project of its kind by the joint venture between Japanese research group RIKEN and German research group Forschungszentrum Julich. Mapping and then stimulating the human brain requires next-gen supercomputing, an order of computational power known as "Exscale-Computing". Exascale computers are those which can carry out a quintillion floating point operations per second, which is an important milestone in computing. No computer of this power yet exist but but Intel has said that it aims to have such a machine in operation by 2018.