By exploiting the full computational power of the Japanese
supercomputer, K computer, researchers from the RIKEN HPCI Program for
Computational Life Sciences, the Okinawa Institute of Technology Graduate
University (OIST) in Japan and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany have carried
out the largest general neuronal network simulation to date.
The simulation was made possible by the development of
advanced novel data structures for the simulation software NEST. The relevance
of the achievement for neuroscience lies in the fact that NEST is open-source
software freely available to every scientist in the world.