SC Conference - Activity Details

Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan  (IBM Almaden Research Center)

Steven K. Esser  (IBM Almaden Research Center)

Horst D. Simon  (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Dharmendra S. Modha  (IBM Almaden Research Center)

Wednesday,  04:00PM - 04:30PM

Room PB255

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.

The full paper can be found in the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Computer Society