A special room was built for Blue Gene at the EPFL, and the machine sits on top of a large room that holds the cooling equipment and computer cables, Markram says. Ice-cold water from Lake Geneva is pumped in to support the cooling system. The actual computer "takes up only a small space," Markram notes, and is only about the size of four refrigerators running on four racks.

Blue Gene is an 8,096-processor supercomputer, and it will model one to 10 neurons per processor. The computer could allow simulations of as many as 100 million simple neurons, which is about half the number of neurons in a rat brain. A PFLOPS Blue Gene, which IBM says is several years away, would make it possible to simulate nearly a billion simple neurons, Markram says. "But improvements in processing speed and memory could mean the entire human brain could be simulated within a decade," he adds.

IBM's Ajay Royyuru, head of Blue Gene computing as applied to life sciences, says the supercomputer's role is another indication that "biology [has become] information science."

"The scale of this computing will reveal interesting things in biology. We need that scale to get at the complexity that biological systems have," he says. And the trickle-down effect from Blue Brain to other computing projects in science and industry will be enormous, he adds.

For example, Markram says, ASIC designs that emulate neuron network behavior might be developed for use in information processing in intelligent devices. And, more generally, he says that Blue Brain will teach lessons about real-time data processing, as opposed to off-line processing.