Johanna Senk, Anno C. Kurth, Steve Furber, Tobias Gemmeke, Bruno Golosio, Arne Heittmann, James C Knight, Eric Müller, Tobias G. Noll, Thomas Nowotny, Gorka Peraza Coppola, Luca Peres, Oliver Rhodes, Andrew Rowley, Johannes Schemmel, Tim Stadtmann, Tom Tetzlaff, Gianmarco Tiddia, Sacha J. van Albada, José Villamar, Markus Diesmann
Abstract The local circuitry of the mammalian brain is a focus of the search for generic computational principles because it is largely conserved across species and modalities. In 2014 a model was proposed representing all neurons and synapses of the stereotypical cortical microcircuit below 1 mm 2 of brain surface. The model reproduces fundamental features of brain activity but its impact remained limited because of its computational demands. For theory and simulation, however, the model was a breakthrough because it is full-scale, therefore free of uncertainties of downscaling, and larger models are less densely connected. This sparked a race in the neuromorphic computing community and the model became a de facto standard benchmark. Within a few years real-time performance was reached and surpassed at significantly reduced energy consumption. We review how the computational challenge was tackled by different simulation technologies and derive guidelines for the next generation of benchmarks and other domains of science.