‘Brain-inspired’ supercomputer with no GPUs or storage switched on — SpiNNaker 2 mimics 150-180 million neurons

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‘Brain-inspired’ supercomputer with no GPUs or storage switched on — SpiNNaker 2 mimics 150-180 million neurons

Sandia National Laboratories has allegedly activated its own SpiNNaker 2 server, a brain-inspired supercomputer comprising thousands of ARM-based CPU cores that don’t require SSDs, hard drives, or GPUs.

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reports the new supercomputer will rank among the top five brain-inspired platforms worldwide.

Sandia is reportedly utilizing a 24-board version of the SpiNNaker 2 architecture, featuring a total of 175,000 cores. Each board reportedly carries 96GB of LPDDR4 memory, giving the system 2.3TB of memory and 23GB of integrated on-chip SRAM storage.

SpiNNaker 2 motherboard (Image credit: Spinncloud)

SpiNNaker 2, or Spiking Neural Network Architecture 2, is a computer architecture inspired by the human brain — mimicking the actions of neurons and synapses (and is a form of Neuromorphic computing). The architecture relies on dozens of motherboards, each featuring nearly 50 ARM CPUs, all communicating via a vast web of interconnects. This design choice prioritizes boosting computational efficiency over maximizing raw performance through brute force methods, which is common in today’s mainstream AI processors/GPUs (such as Nvidia’s B200).

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SpiNNaker’s unique design also affords it so much memory and SRAM storage that it doesn’t require any dedicated storage. Anything and everything the server is working on is stored permanently in the server’s LPDDR4 memory and SRAM.

The second version of SpiNNaker represents a significant upgrade over its predecessor, achieving a 10-fold increase in core count compared to SpiNNaker 1. Other upgrades include the transition to a 22nm FD-SOI (22FDX) manufacturing process, adaptive body biasing for near-threshold voltage operation, workload dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, and accelerated and customized chip-to-chip interconnects.

SpiNNaker is capable of processing large-scale hybrid AI models, as well as biological neural simulations and whole-brain modeling, with its unique design. It is also highly scalable, with a machine in Dresden allegedly projected to incorporate over 720 motherboards, totaling 5.2 million CPU cores once complete.

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