Intel announced the readiness of Pohoiki Springs, its latest and most powerful neuromorphic research system providing the computational capacity of 100 million neurons. Pohoiki Springs is a data center rack-mounted system. It integrates 768 Loihi neuromorphic research chips inside a chassis the size of five standard servers. Neuromorphic systems are not intended to replace conventional computing systems. Instead, they provide a tool for researchers to develop and characterize new neuro-inspired algorithms for real-time processing, problem solving, adaptation and learning.
The cloud-based system will be made available to members of the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC), extending their neuromorphic work to solve larger, more complex problems.
“Pohoiki Springs scales up our Loihi neuromorphic research chip by more than 750 times, while operating at a power level of under 500 watts. The system enables our research partners to explore ways to accelerate workloads that run slowly today on conventional architectures, including high-performance computing (HPC) systems,” stated Mike Davies, director of Intel’s Neuromorphic Computing Lab
Intel says its Loihi processors take inspiration from the human brain, processing certain workloads up to 1,000 times faster and 10,000 times more efficiently than conventional processors.
Intel releases Loihi research chip for neuromorphic processing
Intel introduced an 8 million-neuron neuromorphic system comprising 64 Loihi research chips — codenamed Pohoiki Beach.
Intel says the highly specialized processor applies principles found in biological brains to computer architectures. The Loihi devices aime to process information up to 1,000 times faster and 10,000 times more efficiently than CPUs for specialized applications like sparse coding, graph search and constraint-satisfaction problems.
“We are impressed with the early results demonstrated as we scale Loihi to create more powerful neuromorphic systems. Pohoiki Beach will now be available to more than 60 ecosystem partners, who will use this specialized system to solve complex, compute-intensive problems,” stated Rich Uhlig, managing director of Intel Labs.
