SoylentNews

takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and IBM will begin testing an array of 16 TrueNorth neuromorphic microprocessors. The 4×4 array of TrueNorth chips costs $1 million and uses just 2.5 W of power. Each TrueNorth chip has 5.4 billion transistors and can supposedly simulate the activity of 1 million "neurons" and 16 million "synapses". The system will be used for machine learning tasks [wsj.com] such as image recognition:

Lawrence Livermore, located in Livermore, Calif., has been evaluating TrueNorth since late 2014, but the 16-microprocessor machine is its first opportunity to run large-scale tests, Mr. Van Essen said. Mr. Van Essen's team will unload some supercomputing tasks to TrueNorth, similar to the way a personal computer uses a specialized graphics processing unit to draw images on a computer's screen. He expects the technology to help the lab weed out potential glitches in simulations of phenomena such as subatomic particle interactions and spot patterns in cybersecurity and video surveillance.

The 16-processor Lawrence Livermore machine is an important test of IBM's TrueNorth technology, according to Luis Ceze, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington. "It's great that they're doing this," he said. "It's very efficient, but they have to show that the accuracy of the models that they implement [is] good enough."

Big Blue isn't the only company trying to build processors that excel at deep learning. Qualcomm is working on a similar chip called Zeroth [qualcomm.com]. Microsoft researchers are experimenting with programmable processors [microsoft.com] designed to work with the company's Bing search engine.

Found at NextBigFuture [nextbigfuture.com].

Original Submission