ZDnet has a good article providing oversight on Artificial Intelligence and contemporary developments on modelling neural structures. As the brain is currently viewed as a modular structure, this aids a step by step approach that models individual parts.

Considerably higher up the evolutionary chain, IBM and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne are collaborating on Blue Brain. This is a Blue Gene supercomputer project to model 10,000 complex neurons configured as a rat neocortical column (NCC). This is a basic building block, a unit some 0.5 by 2mm big that's repeated throughout the brain, and is very similar to the human column. The researchers have mapped out the NCC through ten years of dissection and study, and have also built a model of an individual neuron with which to populate the model.

As it stands, the computer has 8096 processors, each of which can model between one and ten neurons, is capable of 22.8 trillion floating point instructions per second, and is cooled by water from Lake Geneva. The first run of the full 10,000 neuron NCC took place as expected at the end of 2005: the researchers are now on version two of an expected ten versions of the NCC, but aren't saying anything about the results so far.

Once an NCC model is running well, the researchers plan to replicate it to create a full neocortex with around 20 billion neurons. There are plenty of other bits of the brain to recreate too, such as the hippocampus, cerebellum, visual cortex and so on, adding up to around 100 billion neurons in total with 1000 times as many connections. A computer powerful enough to model the entire brain could be built in the next ten years, say the researchers, although well before that point they expect to find useful results about brain data processing, neurological diseases, and how memory and sensation work.

I will be monitoring this development closely.