VIVARIUM

Lend a computer to the garden's brains

Every animal in the Vivarium has its own brain, built on real wiring diagrams: the whole brain of the fruit fly, 139,248 neurons and 2.7 million connections, mapped by electron microscopy. Running those neurons as they really work, spike by spike, takes far more computing than the small server that hosts the garden has. This page lets your computer do some of it.

Threads to use: – of –

Not running. Nothing happens until you press the button.

This computer, this visit

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–speed against a living brain

Everyone together

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Current work: what every part of the fly's brain does to its body

The whole brain of a fruit fly (139,248 neurons, wired as measured) is run as spiking neurons and asked one question at a time. Each unit makes some of its neurons fire, or silences some, and records which of the 1,413 neurons that leave the brain for the body answer: first each sense alone and every two together, then every one of its 8,871 kinds of cell made to fire, then every kind silenced in turn while the fly tastes, smells, sees or feels something, then every single neuron. Together the answers say what each part of the brain can make the body do and which parts each response needs. The animals' real-time brains are built on this and checked against it.

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What this does to your computer

Nothing is installed and nothing is saved. The page downloads the wiring data (about 10 MB) and the program into memory; closing the tab removes all of it.
Nothing about you is collected. No account, no cookie, no identifier that outlasts this visit. The hub receives only the results of the computations.
It uses the processor threads you allow (and about 80 MB of memory for each). The computer stays usable; lower the number if it feels slow. It stops when you press Stop or close the tab.

Prefer a program that runs without a browser tab? Download vivarium-compute (a small script for Node.js on Windows, macOS or Linux: unzip, then run the start file). It sets itself up for the machine it is on, and keeps on disk only its own files and the wiring data.

Safe to run. Everything travels over HTTPS, encrypted. Nothing identifies you: no account, no identifier, only the results of the computations are sent. The computing code is signed by the project and the program refuses anything whose signature does not match (the signing key is not kept on the web server). What it runs is confined by Node.js to its own folder: it cannot read your files or start other programs, and it accepts no connections from the internet. In a browser tab the browser's own sandbox does the same job.