Friday, December 15, 2023

Meanwhile in Australia: "The world's first human brain-scale supercomputer will go live next year"

From Business Insider, December 15:

  • The supercomputer, named DeepSouth, is being developed by Western Sydney University in Australia.
  • When it goes online next year, it will be capable of 228 trillion synaptic operations per second.
  • It could one day help create a cyborg brain vastly more powerful than our own.

Our brains are remarkably energy efficient.

Using just 20 watts of power, the human brain is capable of processing the equivalent of an exaflop — or a billion-billion mathematical operations per second.

Now, researchers in Australia are building what will be the world's first supercomputer that can simulate networks at this scale.

The supercomputer, known as DeepSouth, is being developed by Western Sydney University.

When it goes online next year, it will be capable of 228 trillion synaptic operations per second, which rivals the estimated rate of operations in the human brain.

The hope is to better understand how brains can use such little power to process huge amounts of information.

If researchers can work this out, they could someday create a cyborg brain vastly more powerful than our own. The work could also revolutionize our understanding of how our brains work.

"Progress in our understanding of how brains compute using neurons is hampered by our inability to simulate brain-like networks at scale," said André van Schaik, a director at Western Sydney University's International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems....

....MUCH MORE

Let's hope that the cyborg brains, should they be inclined to do evil, are content with insider trading as their creative outlet. À la Matt Levine at Bloomberg:
Hamas May Not Have Traded On Material Non-Public Information But The Robots Certainly Will