The cat is out of the bag

Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, Steven K. Esser, Horst D. Simon, Dharmendra S. Modha

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

206 Scopus citations

Abstract

In the quest for cognitive computing, we have built a massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, that incorporates a number of innovations in computation, memory, and communication. Using C2 on LLNL's Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer with 147, 456 CPUs and 144 TB of main memory, we report two cortical simulations - at unprecedented scale - that effectively saturate the entire memory capacity and refresh it at least every simulated second. The first simulation consists of 1.6 billion neurons and 8.87 trillion synapses with experimentally-measured gray matter thalamocortical connectivity. The second simulation has 900 million neurons and 9 trillion synapses with probabilistic connectivity. We demonstrate nearly perfect weak scaling and attractive strong scaling. The simulations, which incorporate phenomenological spiking neurons, individual learning synapses, axonal delays, and dynamic synaptic channels, exceed the scale of the cat cortex, marking the dawn of a new era in the scale of cortical simulations. Copyright 2009 ACM.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the Conference on High Performance Computing Networking, Storage and Analysis - SC '09
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
ISBN (Print)9781605587448
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Externally publishedYes

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The cat is out of the bag'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this