In this video from the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship meeting, Steve Esser from the IBM Almaden Research Center presents: SyNAPSE and Cortical Processor.

I will describe a decade-long, multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional effort spanning neuroscience, supercomputing and nanotechnology to build and demonstrate a brain-inspired computer and describe the architecture, programming model and applications. I also will describe future efforts in collaboration with DOE to build, literally, a “brain-in-a-box”. The work was built on simulations conducted on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Dawn and Sequoia HPC systems in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

SyNAPSE is a DARPA program that aims to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels. More simply stated, it is an attempt to build a new kind of cognitive computer with similar form, function, and architecture to the mammalian brain. Such artificial brains would be used in robots whose intelligence would scale with the size of the neural system in terms of total number of neurons and synapses and their connectivity. SyNAPSE is a backronym standing for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics. The name alludes to synapses, the junctions between biological neurons. The program is being undertaken by HRL Laboratories (HRL), Hewlett-Packard, and IBM Research.

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