A million ARM9 processors in a massively parallel system will model a billion neuron brain simulation.
The SpiNNaker project, by 4 UK universities, will connect more than a million ARM processors, the energy-efficient chips used in most of today’s mobile phones, into a single system that will be able to simulate the behavior of 1 billion neurons.
That is just 1 percent as many as are in a human brain but more than 10 times as many as are in the brain of a mouse.
The machine will consist of 57 600 custom-designed chips, each of which contains 18 low-power ARM9 processor cores. At the center of each chip, is a specially designed router that receives and directs all the packets coming from the cores and forms links with neighboring chips. Each chip is connected to 128 megabytes of SDRAM to hold the connectivity information for up to 16 million synaptic connections.
A thousand simulated neurons on each processor receive the simulated spike signals from other neurons and output their own spikes via the wires that interconnect each of the processors and routers.
This approach mimics the asynchronous way the brain works. Communications between processors are initiated whenever a sender wants to send, and signals arriving at the receiver must be handled, ready or not. As in the brain, the precise ordering of signals is unknown, and the results can differ in minor ways from one run to the next.
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