IBM’s brain-inspired chip finds a home at Livermore National Lab (original) (raw)

IBM also designed it to scale, as each "neuron" on the chip had the capacity to communicate with a neuron on an entirely separate chip. "We have begun building neurosynaptic super-computers," its developers wrote at the time, "by tiling multiple TrueNorth chips, creating systems with hundreds of thousands of cores, hundreds of millions of neurons, and hundreds of billion of synapses."

And that's precisely what Lawrence Livermore is getting. The hardware is a cluster of 16 True North chips, able to deploy up to 16 million silicon neurons and establish 4 billion synapses. (For context, the human brain has 86 billion neurons, so we've still got a bit of a computational lead at the moment.) When running flat out, the entire cluster will consume a grand total of 2.5 watts.

At the moment, Lawrence Livermore plans on testing whether neural networks are useful for the sorts of problems that the lab typically needs to solve. The deal, worth $1 million for IBM, includes all the support and development tools needed to implement neural networks on the cluster. But it will undoubtedly pay for itself in lower electrical bills if researchers can move any of their problems off Lawrence Livermore's more traditional supercomputers.