Brain Power
A brain-inspired chip to transform mobility and Internet of Things through sensory perception
- Transforming Mobile
Low power chips could make your mobile phone as powerful as a supercomputer.
- Jellyfish Sensors
Buoys could monitor shipping lanes for safety and environmental protection.
- Sensor Flower
Conversation sensors could identify and understand voice and appearance to automatically generate transcripts.
- Roller Bot
Autonomous bots could be deployed in a disaster area to sense location of victims in search and rescue operations.
- Thermometers That Can Smell
Sensors in future medical devices could recognize odors from certain bacteria.
What is a cognitive chip? The latest SyNAPSE chip, introduced on August 7, 2014, has the potential to transform mobility by spurring innovation around an entirely new class of applications with sensory capabilities at incredibly low power levels. This is enabled by an revolutionary new technology design inspired by the human brain. IBM built a new chip with a brain-inspired computer architecture powered by an unprecedented 1 million neurons and 256 million synapses. It is the largest chip IBM has ever built at 5.4 billion transistors, and has an on-chip network of 4,096 neurosynaptic cores. Yet, it only consumes 70mW during real-time operation — orders of magnitude less energy than traditional chips. As part of a complete cognitive hardware and software ecosystem, this technology opens new computing frontiers for distributed sensor and supercomputing applications.
Epic Shift to Low-Power Supercomputers
“The architecture can solve a wide class of problems from vision, audition, and multi-sensory fusion, and has the potential to revolutionize the computer industry by integrating brain-like capability into devices where computation is constrained by power and speed.”
— Dharmendra Modha, IBM Fellow
Read Dr. Modha's SyNAPSE article, here.
Share the "Brain Power" infographic
Neurosynaptic systems
Building applications for cognitive computers
IBM’s brain-inspired architecture consists of a network of neurosynaptic cores. Cores are distributed and operate in parallel. Cores operate—without a clock—in an event-driven fashion. Cores integrate memory, computation, and communication. Individual cores can fail and yet, like the brain, the architecture can still function. Cores on the same chip communicate with one another via an on-chip event-driven network. Chips communicate via an inter-chip interface leading to seamless scalability like the cortex, enabling creation of scalable neuromorphic systems.
A video camera on Hoover Tower at Stanford University is looking down at the plaza, below. A simulated network of IBM TrueNorth chips takes in the video data and locates interesting objects. Objects might look interesting to the system because they are moving or have a different color or texture than the background. The system then further processes those portions of the interesting video to determine what the objects are. It is trained in several specific categories, such as buses, cars, people, and cyclists. In a monitoring application, the camera would only need to communicate when it found an interesting object, rather than continually streaming video to a central location.
Share the "Brain Power" infographic
Programming this new architecture requires a fundamentally new way of thinking, so IBM Research built SyNAPSE University — a curriculum of lectures, hands-on exercises, and expert coaching that helps interested parties build these complex neurosynaptic systems. It will be a place to work with current, and develop new, business and academic partnerships. If you are interested in collaborating with IBM Research, please fill out our online information form.
Share this SyNAPSE page
Publications
- Supercomputing
Demonstrated the simulation of the new architecture at unprecedented scale of 1014 synapses on Blue Gene/Q.
- Computer Architecture
Demonstrated a key building block of a novel architecture, namely, a neurosynaptic core, with 256 digital integrate-and-fire neurons and a 1024×256 bit SRAM crossbar memory for synapses using IBM 45nm SOI process.
- Vision
Presented the vision of bringing together neuroscience, supercomputing, and nanotechnology to discover, demonstrate, and deliver the brain's core algorithms.
- Neuroscience
Derived, analyzed, and visualized the largest long-distance wiring diagram in the Macaque brain.
- Cognitive Computing Commercialization
Boundary Objects For Communication
- Cognitive Computing Programming Paradigm
A Corelet Language for Composing Networks of Neurosynaptic Cores
- Cognitive Computing Building Block
A Versatile and Efficient Digital Neuron Model for Neurosynaptic Cores
- Cognitive Computing Systems
Algorithms and Applications for Networks of Neurosynaptic Cores
Articles
- The Atlantic: Systems That Perceive, Think, and Act
- Discover: The Quest to Build a Silicon Brain
- The Economist: Neuromorphic computing The machine of a new soul
- New York Times: I.B.M. Announces Brainy Computer Chip
- Science: First Place in Illustration Category of 2012 Science/NSF International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge
- A New Era of Computing Requires a New Way to Program Computers