At 200 Petaflops and 1 million cores, supposedly it was designed to copy the workings of the human brain and unlock its secrets.
Built by the University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science, it took 12 years and $19.5 million to complete the project, which had its one-millionth processor core fitted last week. SpiNNaker is capable of performing 200 million million actions per second, with each chip containing 100 million moving parts.
SpiNNaker brings the creators’ ultimate aim of building a model of a billion biological neurons in real time a step closer. The neuromorphic supercomputer will run large-scale real-time simulations of different regions of the brain, including the Basal Ganglia, which is an area affected by Parkinson’s disease. It’s hoped this will lead to neurological breakthroughs in areas such as pharmaceutical testing.
