SpiNNaker - A Spiking Neural Network Architecture

Abstract

This book is the story of the first 20 years of this research programme, an outcome of which is the world’s largest neuromorphic computing platform ultimately incorporating a million processor cores, capable of modelling spiking neural networks of the scale of a mouse brain in biological real time. The mouse brain is around a thousand times smaller than, but in some senses otherwise very similar to, the human brain. So there is still a long way to go to deliver a realtime model of a full human brain, but SpiNNaker can support sophisticated and biologically-realistic models of substantial brain subsystems, albeit with the emphasis on the details of the network topology rather than the internal complexities of the individual neurons.