SPINNAKER COMPUTER

 Sanjay.R
3^rd Sem BCA, NCMS

Spinnaker (Spiking Neural Network Architecture) is a massive parallel, supercomputer architecture designed by the Advanced Processor Technologies research group (APT) at the department of computer science, University of Manchester.  Spinnaker is composed of 57,600 processing nodes , each with 18 ARM9 processors(specially ARM968) and 128MB of mobile DDR SDRAM, totaling 1,036,800 cores and over 7TB of RAM. The computing platform is based on spiking neural networks, useful in simulating the human brain.

  The completed design is housed in 10 19-inch racks, with each rack holding over 100,000 crores. The card’s holding the chip’s are held in 5 blade enclosures, and each core emulates 1000 neurons. In total, the goal is to simulate the behavior of aggregates of up to a billion neurons in real time. This machine requires about 100kw from a 24 V supply and an air conditioned environment.  Spinnaker is being used as one component of the neuromorphic computing platform for the human brain project.

On 14 October 2018 the HBP announced that the million core milestone had been achieved.

On 24 September 2019 HBP announced that a 8 million euro grant ,that will fund construction of the second generation machine, (called spincloud) has been given to TU Dresden.

Developer                Steve Furber

Type                         Neuromorphic

Release date            2019

CPU                          ARM968E-S@ 200MHz

Memory                    7 TB