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'Human brain' supercomputer with 1M processors switched on for first time
- PopePompous 8y agoFrom the article: "The newly formed million-processor-core ‘Spiking Neural Network Architecture’ or ‘SpiNNaker’ machine is capable of completing more than 200 million million actions per second, with each of its chips having 100 million moving parts." I kinda doubt that.
- EamonnMR 8y agoMaybe they are fundamentally misunderstanding what a transistor is? That number still seems low. Maybe electrons are the moving parts? (then that number would be very low.)
- tempay 8y agoIt looks like they're fairly minimal cores and the power consumption of the entire machine is (relatively) low. http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/hardware/ http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/hardware/
- mr_overalls 8y agoScience journalism is generally just awful. I seriously think that a major reason for the lack of public scientific literacy (I get an earful of anti-evolution, anti-climate change, anti-Big-Bang crap from my conservative family) is the lack of a competent institution for communicating these truths. Outside of scientific journals, and the occasional pop-sci bestseller, the average person has to rely on university press releases, bloggers, and magazine writers - and they generally seem to be terrible at their jobs.
- azinman2 8y agoI don’t think science journalism is the reason why anti-science themes have evolved in the public mindset. Science used to be culturally important in the 50s as a way to understand truth, explore the world, improve life, and create industry. It’s since been challenged by both religion and industry via politicians for viewpoints that go against some of their desires. Politicians have since used it as a tool for dividing, reinforcing the anti-science climate. I don’t think it’s fair to blame journalists here.
- neuromantik8086 8y ago> Science used to be culturally important in the 50s as a way to [beat the communists]. Fixed that for you
- umvi 8y ago> anti-evolution, anti-climate change, anti-Big-Bang crap from my conservative family At least anecdotally, my conservative family is like this because those topics have been used in the past to attack/bludgeon their religious beliefs which leads my family to dig in their heels, double down on their beliefs, and close their minds to accepting them. I've made a lot of progress by instead showing how those things are not only not anti-religious topics, but quite the opposite - they bring us closer to the truth of how God accomplishes what he does. Once they feel that their core beliefs are not being threatened, but merely augmented, it's much easier to accept them.
- darkmighty 8y agoHonestly, scientific literacy does jeopardize the "personal God" concept, and in particular obviously the Christian mythology. There are still plenty of christian scientists though, some more keen on the moral teaching and community aspect of the religion, some interpret the texts as non-literal (a tiny minority I presume cling to literal texts). I mean, I'm all for more engagement and scientific literacy, but let's not pretend there isn't some conflict here; specially for the more hardline churches -- while catholicism in particular seems happy to transition its role (into important lessons and social support) and turn dogma into allegory.
- reaperducer 8y agolet's not pretend there isn't some conflict here Science and religion can get along just fine. Half of the craters on the moon are named after priests. "Cells" are named for the places where monks live. The Vatican has operated scientific observatories for centuries. There's even one in Arizona that makes important discoveries to this day. The whole science vs. religion meme is something that the internet has amplified out of proportion by latching onto fringe groups and smaller denominations and holding them up as the only kind of religion that exists, creating artificial levels conflict to justify their position.
- mr_overalls 8y ago> Half of the craters on the moon are named after priests. Sure, religious folks often don't have a problem with simple empirical observations (I mean, the Catholic church _did_ get around to pardoning Galileo 350 years after they murdered him). But Lord help you if you apply the scientific standards of empirical rigor or explanatory parsimony to any topics further afield. Most obviously, there isn't a shred of evidence - none whatsoever - for the existence of a divine being along the lines of what's posited by the Abrahamic religions.
- swebs 8y agoYeah, I've noticed the same. There's also a lot of anti-biology from my left-wing friends. The problem is also compounded by the fact that Wikipedia discourages primary sources in favor of shoddy reporting. It makes sense to reject self published scientific articles in favor of journal-published articles. But more often than not, modern media outlets just seem like a vector for adding political bias and inaccuracies by reporting on things they don't really understand.
- m3mpp 8y ago"Conservatives are anti-science": no downvote. "Liberals are anti-biology": downvote. HN is funny...
- floatboth 8y agoWell known fact: no downvote. Transphobic dog-whistle: downvote.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoCan you give some examples of liberals being anti-biology? That seems so far from even the common stereotypes of liberals that I'm genuinely not sure what you're talking about.
- swebs 8y agohttps://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.html https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.htm...
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoThere are some legitimate concerns there. However, given that the current Republican White House is outright censoring government science agencies on a large scale[1][2] when their results are politically inconvenient, it's pretty laughable to claim that leftists are the real science-haters. This article was published before the 2016 election, so at the time it might have been merely naive, but I see that the author has a video from just a few months ago where he "explains that the real war on science is the one from the left." He is absolutely not arguing in good faith. [1] http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker/ http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tr... [2] http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/silencing-science-tracker/fws-scientists-prevented-from-working-in-politically-contentious-areas/ http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/silencing-science-tracker/fws-...
- dkfellows 8y ago> Science journalism is generally just awful. Not just science journalism. I've yet to see a journalist get a story 100% right where I knew the facts personally ahead of time. If you're lucky, they've just garbled people's names...
- bem94 8y agoI'd assume that by "moving parts" they mean transistors. Ofcourse this is somewhat confusing to people who know how computers are composed of transistors and what transistors are. But if you just want to convey to the lay person the complexity of the component, I'd say it's a reasonable way to do it.
- geoah 8y agoA modern consumer CPU has over 500m transistors, so that number is pretty low for a transistor count.
- WoodenChair 8y ago>A modern consumer CPU has over 500m transistors Try 10 billion https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/30/apple-announces-a12x-with-an-8-core-gpu-90-better-multicore-performance/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/30/apple-announces-a12x-with...
- dkfellows 8y agoIt really depends on whether you include the memory in that count, as memory uses masses of transistors without being very interesting as most of those transistors spend their time just sitting there in a stable state. It's the transistor count (more properly, the gate count; gates can be thought of as multiple transistors fused together, yet they're truly a single thing in terms of manufacturing and layout) in the computational parts of the processor that is really interesting. SpiNNaker is built using old ARM968 cores on an ancient process (because that was cheap, for various reasons). The SpiNNaker2 hardware (under design; I can't remember if it is next year or the one after when it is finalized) will be on a modern process that will let us pack ten times as many cores on per chip, with those cores being quite a lot more powerful. Which isn't bad; we're not a commercial outfit here…
- xxs 8y agothat's some core2 stuff of 2008-2010
- 8y ago
- liftbigweights 8y ago"200 million million", "actions per second" and "100 million moving parts". Why write like this? Either the writer is trying to dumb it down to a ridiculous level or they have no idea what they are talking about and just threw technical words together.
- jwmerrill 8y agoI think 200 million million is a British English thing because of the long scale/short scale ambiguity: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
- EmbarrassedFuel 8y agoAs a Brit, no one has made the million/milliard distinction for my entire life. 1000 million is a billion as far as anyone is concerned, a million million is a trillion. It’s just comically bad writing.
- jwmerrill 8y agoGood to know. I think the writing in this article is not so good, but I've seen this usage by plenty of respectable writers. Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" is not comically bad writing, and it's full of even more outlandish usages of "million million million ..." https://www.google.com/search?q=brief+history+of+time+"million+million" https://www.google.com/search?q=brief+history+of+time+"milli...
- EmbarrassedFuel 8y agoAh yes point taken: I was implying that the author had used this (nowadays) non-standard construction in order to add some sensationalism.
- transpy 8y agoI am laughing at this. He is describing it as if it were a steampunk device.
- shshhdhs 8y ago> capable of completing more than 200 million million actions per second > To reach this point it has taken £15million in funding, 20 years in conception and over 10 years in construction, with the initial build starting way back in 2006. Wow, those numbers.. and 10 years to build... I’d be very excited to turn it on!
- Aeolun 8y ago15 million in funding for 1 million processors? So every processor cost only 15£? That sounds pretty good to me.
- tyingq 8y ago"The chip is a Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous (GALS) system with 18 ARM968 processor nodes"[1] So, 18 cores per chip. 55,556 chips. £270 per chip. Still pretty good, considering the £15M is paying for more than a pile of chips. [1] http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/SpiNNchip/ http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/SpiNNchip/
- dkfellows 8y agoThe unit cost of a chip isn't too much. The price of doing the design and creating the masks for the silicon OTOH...
- empath75 8y agoAt that time scale it probably would be cheaper to wait 10 years and then build it with cheaper faster processors.
- drannex 8y agoHappy to see Stanford R. Ovshinskys dreams being created, even thought it is years past his death.
- EamonnMR 8y ago> Biological neurons are basic brain cells present in the nervous system that communicate primarily by emitting ‘spikes’ of pure electro-chemical energy. I don't think that those are terms of art.
- melling 8y agoSteve Furber did some early design work in the ARM processor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Furber https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Furber
- ctdonath 8y ago"...and even before its data banks had been connected, it deduced the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off." - H2G2
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoDoes that add up? Doesn't the human brain have several more zeroes on there? Maybe 'worm brain' or 'lizard brain' would be a better description?
- delecti 8y agoIt's about 100B neurons in a human brain [0], but neurons are also much slower. Individual neurons run at under 200Hz [1], which is probably a half dozen orders of magnitude lower than these processors are running at. Maybe it balances out? [0] https://www.verywellmind.com/how-many-neurons-are-in-the-brain-2794889 https://www.verywellmind.com/how-many-neurons-are-in-the-bra... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_oscillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_oscillation
- Retric 8y agoNeurons do a lot more than 1 calculation for each of those Hz. Dendritic branching can be extensive and in some cases is sufficient to receive as many as 100,000 inputs to a single neuron. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrite A more conservative 10,000 * 200 Hz ~= 2 Mhz * 100B ~= 100 Million 2 Ghz processors cores. Though each dendrite is again doing far more than one calculation per each of those cycles.
- delecti 8y agoWhile true, the same is also true for many processor architectures. They're not just doing a single mathematical calculation per cycle, and additionally they also take multiple bits of input. A 32 bit processor could be thought of as having 32 "dendrites" of input, depending on what specific calculations are being performed to emulate the functions of neurons. I recognize that the specifics are very different between a single neuron and a single processor, but the processors are so much faster that I'm inclined to give some benefit of the doubt to the people actually in possession of the array of 1M processors.
- yellowapple 8y ago
- nyrulez 8y agoThis article, while obviously PR, is confusing to me. It seems to pin too much emphasis on the nature of its hardware as if that's enough to "emulate" the brain. If they don't have folks at the calibre of Deepmind to drive this thing, can it really go very far? What it could be useful for is neural structure modeling at a more primitive layer, even if the end outcome isn't usable for practical consumption.
- dkfellows 8y agoSpiNNaker is particularly for studying neural structure, especially on the scale from small groups of neurons up to brain structures of a few million, on timespans of a few seconds to a few hours at simulation timesteps on the size order of a millisecond. That's a scale where doing the study in vivo or in vitro is technically extremely challenging; signal analysers find that awkward, either to get that many channels that fine or to get that density of sampling. Or both; getting either is hard and getting both is crazy hard. But being able to simulate neural networks that can do their learning on-line and in real time, all while actively processing input (and in a controlled fashion) is an interesting capability anyway, as it means SpiNNaker can control physical robots in interesting ways (and those may be commercially interesting). And it's low-power enough that doing this in the wild is practical, rather than needing to upload everything into the Cloud for analysis. That may also be commercially interesting.
- monk_e_boy 8y ago1M ... 1,000,000 Powers of 10 ... 10 fingers on the ape-man. Such a weird non computing number to be thrilled with. I'm always suspicious when numbers fit into powers of ten like that. Like, somewhere in that build process the person who holds the purse strings doesn't know binary.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoWouldn't any number you were going to stop at be arbitrary? If you can fit 1,000 to a rack, you're going to end up with a multiple of ten by the time they are done. These processors don't need to adhere to 2^X, do they?
- monk_e_boy 8y agoI put 1024 in my rack. Why did you choose 1,000?
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoTotally arbitrary, as is my point.
- vntok 8y agoWhy did you choose 1024?
- strainer 8y agoIts a nice fit for 10 bits
- bencollier49 8y agoBrilliant
- detaro 8y agoIt doesn't actually have exactly 1M processors.
- pixelbreaker 8y agoWon't be long before it's smoking Spice.
- bra-ket 8y agoFurber's lab built an interesting extension on SDM with N-of-M rank codes http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ftp/pub/apt/papers/sbf_TNN07_old.pdf http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ftp/pub/apt/papers/sbf_TNN07_...
- llcoolv 8y ago"‘SpiNNaker’ machine is capable of completing more than 200 million million actions per second, with each of its chips having 100 million moving parts." Could someone elaborate? I am probably missing something as I hadn't heard of moving parts on a solid-state device?
- rm999 8y agoI believe they are referring to the number of transistors per chip (which as you correctly state are not "moving parts"). Also, fun fact: these chips are 7+ years old now! https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6330636 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6330636
- wallace_f 8y agoThe supply side of people who want to do journalism is full of so many people, and the competition for jobs sends most to other career fields. Yet the product of modern journalism is often so sad.
- vkou 8y agoIs it because journalists are bad at doing their jobs, or is it because they do what their employers tell them to?
- adrianN 8y agoMaybe the journalist knows that transistors don't actually move, but thought that its still a useful analogy for the lay audience they target.
- llcoolv 8y agoThis is what caught me off guard - I also share this view on journalism and would not have been surprised, but this piece is published by the Uni of Manchester itself.
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
- marmaduke 8y agoI went to a code jam with some of these guys (as part of the Human Brain Project), the architecture is pretty interesting but it's lots and lots of little ARM (v6?) processors on a grid interconnect, probably not too far from Xeon Phi, even if it aims for neural like computation more so that a Phi.
- tyingq 8y agoARM968 apparently: http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/SpiNNchip/ http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/SpiNNchip/
- gnufx 8y agoDefinitely not like Phi, which is basically a SIMD computational system (linear algebra box?) plus interesting memory configuration, at least in KNL. The SpiNNaker chips have no hardware floating point.
- dkfellows 8y agoThe next generation will have single precision hardware floats, but that's still at the prototype stage (with little bits of the processor running on a monster FPGA in the lab). The key however is that SpiNNaker is a MIMD system (the cores are really independent of each other, except for a shared clock and chip-level shared co-packaged SDRAM) with a very fancy fast multicast interconnect that's been tuned for handling small source-routed packets without guaranteed delivery (but with guaranteed detection of failure to deliver). It's the almost complete antithesis of MPI, and it is by using that well that we get great performance in neural simulation. (I'm a software developer on the team.)
- sakers 8y agoShortly after being switched on, researchers where found telling SpiNNaker exactly what it could do with the lifetime supply of chocolate.
- peterlk 8y agoThis article was pretty low on details, so I went out and collected some links: This looks more or less like another stab at the Cray connection machine[0], but with modern hardware and a better framework about how neural nets can and should work. > The SpiNNaker engine is a massively-parallel multi-core computing system. It will contain up to 1,036,800 ARM9 cores and 7Tbytes of RAM distributed throughout the system in 57K nodes, each node being a System-in-Package (SiP) containing 18 cores plus a 128Mbyte off-die SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory). Each core has associated with it 64Kbytes of data tightly-coupled memory (DTCM) and 32Kbytes of instruction tightly-coupled memory (ITCM). The cores have a variety of ways of communicating with each other and with the memory, the dominant of which is by packets. These are 5- or 9-byte (40- or 72-bit) quanta of information that are transmitted around the system under the aegis of a bespoke concurrent hardware routing system. [1] So, lots of relatively relatively tiny, interconnected nodes. They built their own SoC to handle this. With a built-in router in the middle. The router handles routing on the chip, and multicasts to its neighbors. > The heart of the communications infrastructure is a bespoke multicast router that is able to replicate packets where necessary to implement the multicast function associated with sending the same packet to several different destinations. [2] It also looks like they're developing dev boards [3] So basically, this looks like a giant, really awesome, custom ARM cluster that they want to do neural network stuff with. If anyone from the team is here, I'd love to hear more about how this will be used. Specifically, how will you prevent SpiNNaker from going down the same path as the Connection Machine - (stops doing AI stuff because, say, geneticists want to use it for protein sequencing)? Why do you see this as the future over something like NVIDIA's new HGX-2 or clusters of TPUs? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine [1] http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/architecture/ http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/architectu... [2] http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/SpiNNchip/ http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/SpiNNchip/ [3] http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/hardware/index3.php http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/hardware/i...
- digsmahler 8y agoThank you, that really helps! The original article alone is pretty confusing.
- qwerty456127 8y agoAnd what did it say?
- mrec 8y agoI'm getting NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID with Chrome - am I the only one?
- tempay 8y agoNo issues for me with firefox and everything looks in order https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.manchester.ac.uk&latest https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.mancheste...
- mrec 8y agoHappens with IE too - suspect it's caused by a corp-installed Symantec extension. I'll try again from home. Thanks for checking!
- MBCook 8y agoOnly time will tell if it’s a fair dinkum thinkum.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y agoArticle author: >> The world’s largest neuromorphic supercomputer designed and built to work in the same way a human brain does Project lead: >> We’ve essentially created a machine that works more like a brain than a traditional computer Press releases, ladies and gentlemen.
- yters 8y agoSome are saying this is no where near the amount of processing the human brain has. But, it doesn't seem we need that much of the brain. There are plenty of stories of highly functional and talented individuals with almost no brain, and this machine would probably be in their ballpark.
- neuromantik8086 8y agoI mean, a lot of the brain is devoted to sensation, so if you don't care about simulating how the brain interprets certain aspects of sensation (motion, depth, vision more generally) you could probably simulate other functions. For memory, however, at least, there's a lot of evidence that you'll need to simulate sensory systems to be able to accurately simulate recall [0]. [0] https://books.google.com/books?id=VjZyDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT597&lpg=PT597&dq=cortical+reinstatement&source=bl&ots=raguZOS29j&sig=h9d66-nczgKMdii_U1ZWs_tuVIQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwichN6K7L3eAhXIVN8KHWTzD4w4FBDoATADegQIAxAB#v=onepage&q=cortical%20reinstatement&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=VjZyDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT597&lpg=...
- still_grokking 8y agoFor context: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/remarkable-story-of-maths-genius-who-had-almost-no-brain-1.1026845 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/remarkable-story-of-maths-ge... https://www.drjudithorloff.com/Free-Articles/Is-Your-Brain-Necessary.htm https://www.drjudithorloff.com/Free-Articles/Is-Your-Brain-N... http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Science_No-Brain.pdf http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Science_No-Brain.pdf Another Story: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61127-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...