Project Aimed at Developing Brain-like Computer Underway

Scientists from around the world joined together Monday to begin work on a computer simulation of the brain.

Called the Human Brain Project (HPB), the endeavour represents a consortium of 80 international partners, according to its site, and will work not only to develop the needed technology to create such a computer, but to build a database of brain research published throughout the globe.

"One of the major obstacles to understanding the human brain is the fragmentation of brain research and the data it produces," the site reads. "Our most urgent need is thus a concerted international effort that uses emerging emerging [information and communications] technologies to integrate this data in a unified picture of the brain as a single multi-level system."

According to the BBC, the HBP is roughly the equivalent of the Human Genome Project -- a decade-long, multi-billion study that included thousands of scientists working together to map sequence our entire genetic code.

The HBP, though not aimed at mapping the entire human brain, will include a variety of computer simulations mimicking a number of the brain's functions.

In order to carry out the entirety of the project, researchers first require a supercomputer 1,000 times more powerful than those used today, also known as an "exascale" computer, Discovery News reports.

However, as reported in Fox News, exascale computers are already in the works.

"Well-known manufacturers of supercomputers like IBM, Cray, Intel, and Bull, are committed to building the first exascale machines by approximately 2020. So we are confident we will have the machines we need," Henry Markram, the director of the Human Brain Project at école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, told FoxNews.com.

In the end, partners of the HBP hope to achieve a variety of outcomes through the effort -- not least among them is a greater understanding of brain disease.

"The Human Brain Project is an attempt to build completely new computer science technology that will enable us to collect all the information we have built up about the brain over the years," BBC cited Markram as saying.

"We should begin to understand what makes the human brain unique, the basic mechanisms behind cognition and behaviour," he continued, "how to objectively diagnose brain diseases, and to build new technologies inspired by how the brain computes."