Ted Wong
IBM Research - Almaden
Compass: Simulating 10^14 synapses in a cognitive computing architecture

Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Building 3 Auditorium - 11:00 AM
(Coffee and cookies at 10:30 AM)

Inspired by the function, power, and volume of the organic brain, the IBM SyNAPSE team at IBM Research has developed TrueNorth, a novel modular, non-von Neumann, ultra-low power, compact architecture. TrueNorth consists of a scalable network of neuro-synaptic cores, with each core containing neurons, dendrites, synapses, and axons. As part of our work on TrueNorth, we have developed Compass, a multi-threaded, massively parallel functional simulator and a parallel compiler that maps a network of long-distance pathways in the macaque monkey brain to TrueNorth. Using Compass, we have simulated an unprecedented 2.084 billion neurosynaptic cores containing 53 x 10^10 neurons and 1.37 x 10^14 synapses running at only 1542x slower than real time. We attained this scale by using the Sequoia 96-rack IBM® Blue Gene®/Q supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Labs.

Dr. Theodore Wong is a Research Staff Member at the IBM Research - Almaden, where he leads the development of the Compass architectural simulator as part of the IBM SyNAPSE project. Prior to SyNAPSE, he was the research technical leader for the IBM Virtual Mission Bus (VMB) project, which was a middleware project for supporting distributed, adaptive, hard real-time applications for a dynamic cluster of satellites, under the aegis of the DARPA System F6 program. Dr. Wong's technical interests include: high-performance system simulations, lightweight distributed consistency control, secure group membership protocols, and algorithms for automatic resource reservation and management.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Jacqueline Le Moigne

Sign language interpreter upon request: 301-286-7040