TrueNorth Ecosystem for Brain-Inspired Computing: Scalable Systems, Software, and Applications
SessionState-of-the-Practice: Advanced Applications Development
Session ChairIrene Qualters
Authors
Event Type
Paper
Effective Application of HPC
Intermediate
State of the Practice
TimeTuesday, November 15th11:30am - 12pm
Location255-EF
DescriptionThis paper describes the hardware and software ecosystem encompassing the brain-inspired TrueNorth processor – a 70mW reconfigurable silicon chip with 1 million neurons, 256 million synapses, and 4096 parallel and distributed neural cores. For systems, we present a scale-out system loosely coupling 16 single-chip boards and a scale-up system tightly integrating 16 chips in a 4x4 configuration by exploiting TrueNorth's native tiling. For software, we present an end-to-end ecosystem consisting of a simulator; a programming language; an integrated programming environment; a library of algorithms and applications; firmware; tools for deep learning; a teaching curriculum; and cloud enablement. For the scale-up systems, we summarize our approach to physical placement of neural network, to reduce intra- and inter-chip network traffic. The ecosystem is in use at over 30 universities and government/corporate labs. Our platform is a substrate for a spectrum of applications from mobile and embedded computing to cloud and supercomputers.
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Paper provided by the IEEE Computer SocietyPaper also available from the ACM Digital Library
Authors
Jun Sawada (presenting)
