This kind of power is necessary, even if simulating a complete brain is still a long ways off. Blue Brain co-director Felix Schürmann noted that modelling a single brain region can require solving 100 billion simultaneous equations -- Blue Brain 5's highly parallel 1.06 petaflops can theoretically handle that quickly.

The system has been installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, although it'll be a while before you see the results of what it can do. It could easily prove crucial, though. EPFL hopes the supercomputer will help fulfill the school's goal of modelling entire regions of a mouse's brain by 2020. The data it generates should advance humanity's understanding of the brain and may lead to new disease treatments that weren't even plausible before.