Speaker
Description
As one of the first of its type in Germany, KISSKI has received a test and development board for the SpiNNaker-2 neuromorphic platform, in preparation for a larger system installation in late 2024. This test board will be made available to interested researchers shortly, and the full platform will be offered as a regular KISSKI service to both academic institutions and industry partners.
Neuromorphic hardware such as SpiNNaker arises as a result of reaching the limits of Moore's law and the ensuing diversification of available hardware architectures, which achieve better performance in specific applications while sacrificing the generalist nature of traditional CPU configurations. Neuromorphic hardware in particular was initially designed to facilitate the simulation of networks of spiking neurons, which attempt to emulate the behavior of real neurons. The hardware design considerations required to perform efficient neuron simulations, namely many distributed but smaller compute cores, tightly coupled in a message passing network, also make neuromorphic architectures suitable to various other applications. Among these can be counted AI/ML (in particular, artificial or deep neural networks, which share some similarities to spiking neurons in behavior and application), constraint and optimization problems, network and graph simulations, real time image and signal processing, robotics, and more. Additionally, the hardware usually exhibits low power consumption when compared to other architectures.
This poster will present an introduction to the topic of neuromorphic computing, and showcase the SpiNNaker hardware configuration, software stack, as well as some applications. As such it should be of interest to the wider research and industry community attending KonKIS 24.
