The real value of a simulation is that researchers can have access to data for every single neuron, adds IBM's Charles Peck, head of the Blue Brain project for IBM Research.

Although science "knows a lot of details about the brain, we do not know how the parts fit together and how they are related to thought and learning and perception," he says.

Peck says Markram's team will take measurements from a dozen neurons that have been sliced from rat brains and mounted on a chip. The research will examine the physical structure and the electrical properties of each neuron and how neurons affect one another.

Peck says that a model of multiple NCCs is still far from a model of the whole brain. "Once we have modeled the neocortex, we will have to include models of other brain regions, such as the basal ganglia, hippocampus, cerebellum and so on," he explains.

The Blue Gene supercomputer was installed in July, and the first simulations were run in August, with a simulation of 25,000 simple neurons that took just 60 seconds. "This was just not possible before, and even smaller networks of 1,000 neurons would take weeks to run on a cluster, so this is truly a quantum leap in size and speed," Markram says. Future simulations of 10,000 complex neurons will take much longer.