Overview of the SpiNNaker System Architecture
University of Manchester · University of Southampton
Abstract
SpiNNaker (a contraction of Spiking Neural Network Architecture) is a million-core computing engine whose flagship goal is to be able to simulate the behavior of aggregates of up to a billion neurons in real time. It consists of an array of ARM9 cores, communicating via packets carried by a custom interconnect fabric. The packets are small (40 or 72 bits), and their transmission is brokered entirely by hardware, giving the overall engine an extremely high bisection bandwidth of over 5 billion packets/s. Three of the principal axioms of parallel machine design (memory coherence, synchronicity, and determinism) have been discarded in the design without, surprisingly, compromising the ability to perform…
Citation impact
- FWCI
- 21.23
- Percentile
- 100%
- References
- 19
Authors
7Topics & keywords
- Computer science
- Network packet
- Architecture
- Embedded system
- Computer architecture
- Computer network