Abstract

The 40 person-year effort required to develop the SpiNNaker chip constituted only the first step in the path to build a platform to help understand how the human brain works. The next step was to make SpiNNaker chips work together in a massive scale to simulate very large spiking neural networks. The initial target was to simulate a billion neurons, around 1% of the human brain, in real time. Our estimates suggested that it would require one million processing cores, that is, over 57,000 SpiNNaker chips.