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A million ARM cores to host brain simulator

LONDON – Up to a million ARM processor cores are going to be linked together to simulate the workings of the human brain in a research project in the U.K. The chips, designed at Manchester University and manufactured in Taiwan, form the building blocks for a massively parallel computer called SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network architecture). SpiNNaker is a joint project between the universities of Manchester, Southampton, Cambridge and Sheffield and has been funded with a £5 million (about $8 million) government grant. Professor Steve Furber of the University of Manchester has been studying brain function and architecture for several years, but is also well known as one of the co-designers of the Acorn RISC Machine, a microprocessor that is the forerunner of today's ARM processor cores. Neurons in the brain transmit information as analog electrical spikes. In the SpiNNaker machine these will be modeled as packets of descriptive data. The neuronal processing of these spikes is then run as models or virtual neurons running on the ARM processors. The architecture and used of packetized digital data means that SpiNNaker can transmit spikes as quickly as the brain with many fewer physical connections. An original test chip was designed by Professor Furber's team in 2009 but the latest implementation includes 18 ARM processors per silicon die which come packaged with a memory and have a power budget of about one watt. The chip has been manufactured by UMC (Hsinchu, Taiwan) in 130-nm CMOS. It has a complexity of about 100 million transistors although this is mainly in 55 32-kbyte SRAM blocks distributed across the die, Professor Furber said.

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