Abstract
Inspired by the function, power, and volume of the organic
brain, we are developing TrueNorth, a novel modular, non-von
Neumann, ultra-low power, compact architecture. TrueNorth
consists of a scalable network of neurosynaptic cores, with
each core containing neurons, dendrites, synapses, and
axons. To set sail for TrueNorth, we developed Compass, a
multi-threaded, massively parallel functional simulator and a
parallel compiler that maps a network of long-distance
pathways in the macaque monkey brain to TrueNorth. We
demonstrate near-perfect weak scaling on a 16 rack
IBM® Blue Gene®/Q (262144
CPUs, 256 TB memory), achieving an unprecedented scale of
256 million neurosynaptic cores containing 65 billion neurons
and 16 trillion synapses running only 388X slower than real
time with an average spiking rate of 8.1 Hz. By using emerging
PGAS communication primitives, we also demonstrate 2X
better real-time performance over MPI primitives on a 4 rack
Blue Gene/P (16384 CPUs, 16 TB memory).
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