Cat scan

This week's evidence that End Times are near:

Someone needs to alert Bill Joy -- IBM (NYSE:IBM) scientists, using an ultra-powerful supercomputer, have just replicated the cerebral cortex of your average house cat.

At the SC09 supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., this week, Big Blue announced that it has made "significant progress" toward creating a computer that simulates a living organism's brain with abilities of sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition. Best of all, perhaps, is that IBM said such a computer system could rival "the brain's low power and energy consumption and compact size."

Specifically, scientists from IBM Research, along with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, have reportedly performed the first "near real-time cortical simulation" of a cat brain that contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. The simulation was performed on Lawrence Livermore National Lab's Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer, which has a whopping 147,456 CPUs and 144 terabytes of main memory.

147,456 CPUs and 144 terabytes for a cat brain; sounds about right. The plans of our feline overlords are obviously right on schedule. I can has cheezburger. And you will bring it. Now.