Weird. I heard a small lecture on Blue Brain this morning in class. Here are a few sentences from the power point for anyone that's interested. I've deleted the formatting so it looks like a paragraph, but the writing is choppy since it's supposed to be a talk.
"The Blue Column has ~10,000 neurons and ~5 x 106 synapses. The neurons have realistic geometries and are connected in a network that is itself determined computationally to optimize column calculations. Each neuron can have a unique shape and electrical properties. Each neuron is modeled as 10,000 compartments*, each with a combination of up to a dozen channels, also chosen computationally from a basic set of 20 ion channel genes. One way that the brain differs from a computer is that its basic elements are continually changing. Synaptic plasticity makes the brain ?more like a dynamically morphing computer?.
Rules for synaptic plasticity are included in the software that models neuronal activity. The simulations are run on a Blue Gene/L supercomputer with 65,000 CPU chips (each a 700 mHz processor) and a combined total of 32 TB of memory. It can operate at speeds of up to 360 teraFLOPS (1012 math operations/s). In a second phase of the project, applications developed in the first phase will be made freely available ?to allow a global and spontaneous effort to build software models of the brain?. "
*compartments = segments of dendrite separated by differences in ion channel mixture
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