Brighton puts your brain on GPUs

Researchers at the University of Sussex in Brighton in the UK have employed GPUs in a desktop PC for a large-scale brain simulation that would typically require a supercomputer. The research builds on the work of US researcher Eugene Izhikevich who pioneered a similar method for large-scale brain simulation in 2006. Izhikevich developed a new class of models of spiking neurons that combines computational efficiency of integrate-and-fire and resonate-and-fire models and biological plausibility and versatility of Hodgkin–Huxley type models. The researchers assert that simulations running on the PC consume one-tenth of the energy of a supercomputer. The GPU-accelerated spiking neural