http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/18/ibm_darpa_synapse_project/
DARPA shells out $21m for IBM cat brain chip
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Posted in Rise of the Machines, 18th August 2011
16:27 GMT
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is moving
ahead with IBM in the third leg of its Synapse cat brain chip. That leaves one
more leg, a tail, and nine lives to go.
Because this is the military, the third leg of the Systems
of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (Synapse) project at
DARPA is called phase 2, and IBM's techies have already completed phases 0 and
1. The initial phase of the project simulated the cortex of a cat brain on
an IBM BlueGene massively parallel supercomputer with 147,456 cores and 144TB
of memory and developing the basic synaptic circuits for the brain chip.
[…]
Phase one, which brought in $16.1m in funding spread across
IBM and researchers at Stanford University, the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Center, and
the University of California-Merced, focused on simulating and building
prototype brain chips that have electronic synapses and memory circuits instead
of simulating them using sequentially processing von Neumann-style processors
like the ones on our desktops and in the data centers of the world.
IBM is unveiling the fruits of the phase 1 work today and
the fact that its cognitive computer dream team, headed up by Dharmendra Modha,
the Synapse project leader at IBM Research, as well as announcing that DARPA
has allocated another $21m in funding to begin the phase 2 work.
Like most DARPA projects, Synapse has some impressive goals
and ones that may not pan out. There is a lot of talk about "dawn of a new
paradigm" and "dawn of a new age" as researchers try to create
brain-like systems. The problem, according to DARPA, is that von Neumann
machines, while great for playing Angry Birds and wasting time at work, are
less efficient than biological computers – the ripply, fat-encrusted gray stuff
between your ears – by between a factor of 1 million to 1 billion. It takes an
increasingly complex von Neumann machine to handle increasingly complex data
streaming in from the environment:
[…]
The IBM team is working for DARPA to create a chip that is
designed to chew on streams telemetry and rewire itself, much as your brain
does as it learns, as it learns about the world from that telemetry.
"This is a major initiative to move beyond the von
Neumann paradigm that has been ruling computer architecture for more than half
a century," said Modha in a statement. "Future applications of
computing will increasingly demand functionality that is not efficiently delivered
by the traditional architecture. These chips are another significant step in
the evolution of computers from calculators to learning systems, signaling the
beginning of a new generation of computers and their applications in business,
science and government."
[…]
IBM is not using wetware biological components to make its
neurosynaptic chips, but rather plain old 45 nanometer CMOS with
silicon-on-oxide doping, exactly the same process that IBM is using to etch its
Power7 processors. The neurosynaptic cores replicating the function of
synapses, neurons, and axons in the brain to provide memory, computation, and
communication. IBM has created two prototype neurosynaptic chips thus far,
which have 256 simulated neurons. One design has 262,144 programmable synapses
and the other has 65,536 learning synapses.
IBM has already put these relatively small-brained chips
through the paces performing navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition,
associative memory, and other tasks. The long-term goal of the Synapse project
is to create a system based on the neurosynaptic chips that has 10 billion
electronic neurons and 100 trillion synapses, all packed up in a two-liter
volume and burning only one kilowatt.
[…]
At this point, we humans can tell the Internet to go read
and write itself and get back to goofing off. Or, we'll be working the gas
chambers for Skynet.
In phase 3 of the Synapse project, IBM plans to cook up a
chip with 10 million neurons and work on simulation and design of a fake brain
with 100 million neurons using a multi-chip. In phase 4 of the project, IBM
Research's team hopes to build a robot using this multi-chip fake brain and do
the emulation and simulation of a fake brain with around 10 billion neurons,
what IBM and DARPA call a "human level design". ®
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