Large scale biologically realistic simulations.

[Terry Sejnowski]

I visited the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm recently
and saw a demonstration of the lamprey spinal cord model running
on the 8-K CM-2 there.  The model was developed in collaboration 
with Sten Grillner at the Karoliska Institute and is one of the 
best existing models of coupled nonlinear central pattern generators
based on realistic models of neurons.  The CM-2 demo was impressive
because they have solved the problems of mapping a highly
nonhomogenious network model with voltage dependent channels
onto a bit sliced SIMD machine.  The simulation I saw had 100
spinal segments merrily swimming along at about 10% real time.
One of the realities of running the CM, however, is that the
time required to load a big problem into memory is often much 
longer than it takes to run the problem.  One strategy is to
load 100 copies of the same network and run 100 different sets
of parameters in parallel.

Terry

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