A Brain-Like SuperComputer With 1 Million Processors Is Here
Having taken up more than 15 Million Euros, 20 years of conception and more than 10 years of construction, the world’s largest brain-like supercomputer has finally got its final coprocessor, making it ready to be switched on. The machine just got its one-millionth processor. While the majority of its contributions will be towards science. It can also help assistants like Alexa and Siri better understand accents among different human beings.
Named the Spiking Neural Network Architecture or SpiNNaker for short. The supercomputer is capable of completing more than 200 million actions per second. Additionally, each of its chips has a 100 million transistors. The machine has been designed and developed by the School Of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and can model more biological neutrons than any other machine, in real time.
The Science Behind All The Processors
To understand how this supercomputer works, we just need to understand how the human brain works. The human brain sends out a series of messages through an intricate network of parallel communication architecture. computers on the other hand, send chunks of information from Point A to Point B, no matter how large the information is. The SpiNNaker on the other hand, mimics the brain and uses a number of parallel connections to simultaneously send billions of small bits of information to different destinations.
By doing so, the supercomputer ends up mimicking the billions of biological neurons present in the brain. The brain uses a spikes of electro chemical-energy to send this information across. The SpiNNaker uses large scale systems with electronic circuits to mimc the spikes seen as seen in the human brain.
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The ultimate objective of the team is to make sure that they can mimic the entirety of the human brain. To put things in perspective, the 1 Million processor supercomputer can just mimic 1% of the brain. The supercomputer can then help scientists to better understand how the human brain works and the process it goes through. This will be a huge boost for neuroscience. On the technology front, the supercomputer can be used to help Alexa and Siri better understand human accents and how we interact with machines.
