Despite its diminutive size, the organ packs almost 500 feet of wiring and 54.5 million synapses into the size of a grain of sand — an astonishing feat of computational neurology research that allows scientists to better understand how signals travel throughout the brain.

And thanks to significant advances of some of the world’s most capable supercomputers, researchers at the Jülich Research Centre in Germany are now aiming their sights at a far more ambitious goal: a simulation at the scale of the entire human brain.

Previous attempts, dating back a decade, like the Human Brain Project, fell largely flat, despite considerable government funding. But as New Scientist reports, the Jülich researchers think they can push things forward. The idea is to bring together several models of smaller regions of the brain with a supercomputer to run simulations of billions of firing neurons.