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SpiNNaker Powers Up World's Largest Supercomputer That Emulates a Human Brain
The world's largest neuromorphic supercomputer, the Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNaker), was just switched on for the first time yesterday, boasting one million processor cores and the ability to perform 200 trillion actions per second. HotHardware reports: SpiNNaker has been twenty years and nearly $19.5 million in the making. The project was originally supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), but has been most recently funded by the European Human Brain Project. The supercomputer was designed and built by the University of Manchester's School of Computer Science. Construction began in 2006 and the supercomputer was finally turned on yesterday.
SpiNNaker is not the first supercomputer to incorporate one million processor cores, but it is still incredibly unique since it is designed to mimic the human brain. Most computers send information from one point to another through a standard network. SpiNNaker sends small bits of information to thousands of points, similar to how the neurons pass chemicals and electrical signals through the brain. SpiNNaker uses electronic circuits to imitate neurons. SpiNNaker has so far been used to mimic the processing of more isolated brain networks like the cortex. It has also been used to control SpOmnibot, a robot that processes visual information and navigates towards its targets.
SpiNNaker is not the first supercomputer to incorporate one million processor cores, but it is still incredibly unique since it is designed to mimic the human brain. Most computers send information from one point to another through a standard network. SpiNNaker sends small bits of information to thousands of points, similar to how the neurons pass chemicals and electrical signals through the brain. SpiNNaker uses electronic circuits to imitate neurons. SpiNNaker has so far been used to mimic the processing of more isolated brain networks like the cortex. It has also been used to control SpOmnibot, a robot that processes visual information and navigates towards its targets.
...that the article does not mention that the project lead, Steve Furber was one of the team at Acorn that created the original ARM chip back in the 80s.
Which is it, genius editors ?
In all honesty, I doubt it'll go much beyond the 250,000 neuron mark. Brain simulators tend to also be very slow, the ones I could find on Google could take a few hours to simulate a second of activity.
Based on the core count versus simulation speed versus neurons, a simulator that could handle the whole brain at one second per second would be five miles in diameter and 1,500 feet high.
That doesn't mean this simulator is unimportant. Simulating fractions of the brain in extended time will let neurologists see the effects of medical interventions. That, and not HAL, is the objective of such projects, after all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
A human brain rarely does something spectacular the first days of being turned on.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
That's what it WANTS you to think.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
> only million cpu's, isn't that a few orders of magnitude to small to emulate a human brain anyways, which has hundreds of billions of neurons?
No. There is no reason that you need 1 cpu per neuron.
A biological neuron fires 200 times per second. A single core can simulate the firing of 10,000 neurons per second.
Also, there is no reason the simulation needs to be real-time, so the speed isn't really that important.
Trying to use inorganic matter to simulate consciousness is a fools errand.
Why ? Unless you can point out some fundamental limitations, it's nothing but an argument from incredulity. It's like saying we can only make a functional wing from feathers, and not aluminum.
... which babies can be quite good at!
The word you was looking for is Hemorrhoids.
According to their website, they had custom silicon designed and built. A basic box with these things has 4 CPUs on it, and each CPU has 18 cores onboard, complete with their own high-speed memory for data and instructions.
Check it out over here http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk...
...
Implementing neurons directly in hardware is problematic, as it means you lose (1) flexibility to change the implementation, and (2) economies of scale from using commodity off-the-shelf components. You can offset that somewhat by using FPGAs, which gives you some economy of scale, along with flexibility. There have certainly been a number of neuron-like hardware systems in the past (e.g. CAM, although that's very simplistic), and other systems which are weight adders. I've worked on such systems. However, you can simulate some of it effectively, in terms of cost:compute on GPGPUs and other systems, even if it's overall more efficient to use weight adders directly. Steve Furber's taken a different route to using GPGUs, possibly because of the interconnect topology issues - i.e. if you have a Minsky machine (named after the founder of modern AI) you have a lot of GPGPU horsepower, but apart from NVlinks your distributed connectivity is going to be big box to big box. If you are building something at the scale of SpiNNaker, I doubt that would work, especially if you wanted something hyper-connected.
"Skynet becomes self-aware at 02:14 am Eastern Time after its activation on Nov. 4, 2018 and immediately begins shitposting on 4chan."
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Thank you.
The Chinese Room is one of the worst thought experiments ever to have entered the discourse on functionalism. In its basic form it fails miserably at answering simple questions such as "how many fingers am I holding up?"
When challenged with the requirements to answer such questions, staunch supporters then modify the Chinese Room again and again until the person in it is reduced to nothing more than a hand writing the results of a complex processing system on a piece of paper. Given that no one reasonably assumes understanding or consciousness of a hand, the argument against functionalism has then successfully defeated itself.
A much, much more interesting thought experiment is that of the China Brain. It is really, really hard to wrap your head around how consciousness would exist in a collection of scattered scraps of paper in possession of billions of individuals. The role of space and time in the constitution of our own consciousness become very important in that analysis.
Trying to use inorganic matter to simulate consciousness is a fools errand.
Why ? Unless you can point out some fundamental limitations, it's nothing but an argument from incredulity. It's like saying we can only make a functional wing from feathers, and not aluminum.
You keep saying that ... and AI keeps being just around the corner ...
I thought that joke was bloody obvious.
"A neuron is much simpler than a cpu" - I don't think you're up to speed on the complexity and adaptability of function within one single neuron.
A neuron performs localized non-linear computations with spiking forward and backward throughout it's 10,000 dendrites, it's not a simple "sum". In addition, the long term state of synapses are maintained due to epigenetic changes in the dna, the neuron is managing all of those synaptic weights. Scientists don't fully understand the function of even one type of neuron (there are many many types).
A single neuron is a very complex thing, probably similar to or more complex than a cpu.
"Intelligence is whatever machines haven't done yet.”
If and when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, people might conclude that there is no such thing as intelligence. Or they might simply redefine intelligence as "whatever humans haven't done yet” as they try to catch up with AI. - Tesler