Western Sydney University has announced it will roll out an FGPA-based supercomputer dubbed “DeepSouth” to support its neurological research.
DeepSouth concept art
Western Sydney University
According to the university’s announcement, DeepSouth is the first facility that can simulate networks “at the scale of the human brain”.
It is to be built for the university’s International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems (ICNS), and should be operational by April 2024.
The machine mimics biological processes in hardware, the university said, allowing it to “emulate large networks of spiking neurons at 228 trillion synaptic operations per second”.
That’s close to the estimated rate of operations in the human brain, the university claimed.
As well as supporting high-speed emulation of the brain, ICNS director Professor André van Schaik said the FPGA-based design was more efficient and will use less power than running the simulations as HPC loads.
“Progress in our understanding of how brains compute using neurons is hampered by our inability to simulate brain like networks at scale,” Professor van Schaik said.
“Simulating spiking neural networks on standard computers using graphics processing units (GPUs) and multicore central processing units (CPUs) is just too slow and power intensive.
“Our system will change that.”
DeepSouth will also be smaller than most supercomputers.
“This platform will progress our understanding of the brain and develop brain-scale computing applications in diverse fields including sensing, biomedical, robotics, space, and large-scale AI applications.”
The FPGAs will also make the system hardware-reprogrammable, “enabling the addition of new neuron models, connectivity schemes, and learning rules”, the university said.
Researchers will be able to program the system in Python, meaning they won’t need to learn the specifics of the underlying hardware.
The design was a collaborative effort between ICNS, the universities of Sydney and Melbourne, and Germany’s University of Aachen.
iTnews has asked WSU to identify the commercial partners that will be supplying DeepSouth’s hardware.
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