International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) on Wednesday announced that its researchers have made significant progress toward creating a computer system that simulates the way the brain works.

Reporting their results at a supercomputing conference being held in Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon, IBM researchers said they have achieved a simulation with 1 billion neurons and 10 billion synapses using a supercomputer that has 147,456 processors.

Neurons are the key functional elements of the brain and synapses are the connections between them.

The advancement represents the first near real-time simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat's cerebral cortex, a structure within the brain that plays a key role in memory, attention and thought.

The results indicate the feasibility of building a cognitive computing chip, Dharmendra Modha, one of the researchers, wrote in a blog posting.

"Cognitive computing seeks to engineer the mind by reverse engineering the brain," Modha said. "An emerging discipline, cognitive computing is about building the mind, by understanding the brain."

"We think that cognitive computing has the ability to profoundly transform the world and bring about entirely new computing architectures and, possibly even, industries," he noted.

In a paper presented to the Portland supercomputing conference, the researchers predicted that with further progress in supercomputing, real-time human-scale cortical simulations "are not only within reach, but indeed appear inevitable."