Now, researchers in Australia are building what will be the world's first supercomputer that can simulate networks at this scale.

The supercomputer, known as DeepSouth, is being developed by Western Sydney University.

When it goes online next year, it will be capable of 228 trillion synaptic operations per second, which rivals the estimated rate of operations in the human brain.

The hope is to better understand how brains can use such little power to process huge amounts of information.