Correctness and Performance of the SpiNNaker Architecture

Sharp, Thomas and Furber, Steve

Abstract

SpiNNaker is a computer architecture designed to simulate many millions of neurons in real-time, using very many low-power processors and biologically inspired communications. This paper demonstrates that prototype SpiNNaker hardware correctly and quickly simulates networks of point neurons with respect to established reference simulators. Models of increasing complexity are presented and the simulation results obtained from SpiNNaker, NEST and Brian are shown to correlate. An execution profile is sketched of real-time simulation on SpiNNaker, and it is shown to outperform NEST using similar computational resources on a standard benchmark model.