For decades humans have worked so hard on machines to work as good as a human brain. Now, a new supercomputer, dubbed the SpiNNaker is here to do exactly that.
With 12 years of hard work clubbed with £15 million monetary help, the Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNaker) finally came into being. It comprises nearly one million processors that can perform 200 trillion actions per second and is the world’s largest neuromorphic supercomputer. (Via: HotHardware)
The new supercomputer has been built and designed by the University of Manchester. It has been turned on now after its construction started in the year 2006.
How Does SpiNNaker Works?
It sends across small amounts of information to different locations simultaneously, much like the parallel communication architecture of the human brain. This working is contrary to most of the computers that send vast amounts of information from one point to another through a standard network.
Makers of SpiNNaker have plans of emulating one billion biological neurons with the help of this supercomputer. Even though that’s less compared to the “100 billion neurons that are connected through 1 quadrillion synapses,” it will bring us one step closer to grasping the mechanisms of the human brain.
Steve Furber, Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester said, “We’ve essentially created a machine that works more like a brain than a traditional computer, which is extremely exciting.“
The development team behind the supercomputer believes that it will help them reveal the secrets of the human brain by performing unprecedentedly large-scale simulations. Furthermore, the SpiNNaker can be used to power an AI-based robot, called the SpOmnibot which is capable of figuring out visual objects and navigating towards them.
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