POETS: A Parallel Cluster Architecture for Spiking Neural Network

Mahyar Shahsavari, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, UK, Jonathan Beaumont, David Thomas, Andrew D. Brown
2021 International Journal of Machine Learning and Computing  
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are known as a branch of neuromorphic computing and are currently used in neuroscience applications to understand and model the biological brain. SNNs could also potentially be used in many other application domains such as classification, pattern recognition, and autonomous control. This work presents a highly-scalable hardware platform called POETS, and uses it to implement SNN on a very large number of parallel and reconfigurable FPGA-based processors. The
more » ... nt system consists of 48 FPGAs, providing 3072 processing cores and 49152 threads. We use this hardware to implement up to four million neurons with one thousand synapses. Comparison to other similar platforms shows that the current POETS system is twenty times faster than the Brian simulator, and at least two times faster than SpiNNaker.
doi:10.18178/ijmlc.2021.11.4.1048 fatcat:znyzi4g735dudj4o2lxibcwppe