This looks more or less like another stab at the Cray connection machine[0], but with modern hardware and a better framework about how neural nets can and should work.
> The SpiNNaker engine is a massively-parallel multi-core computing system. It will contain up to 1,036,800 ARM9 cores and 7Tbytes of RAM distributed throughout the system in 57K nodes, each node being a System-in-Package (SiP) containing 18 cores plus a 128Mbyte off-die SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory). Each core has associated with it 64Kbytes of data tightly-coupled memory (DTCM) and 32Kbytes of instruction tightly-coupled memory (ITCM). The cores have a variety of ways of communicating with each other and with the memory, the dominant of which is by packets. These are 5- or 9-byte (40- or 72-bit) quanta of information that are transmitted around the system under the aegis of a bespoke concurrent hardware routing system. [1]
So, lots of relatively relatively tiny, interconnected nodes.
They built their own SoC to handle this. With a built-in router in the middle. The router handles routing on the chip, and multicasts to its neighbors.
> The heart of the communications infrastructure is a bespoke multicast router that is able to replicate packets where necessary to implement the multicast function associated with sending the same packet to several different destinations. [2]
It also looks like they're developing dev boards [3]
So basically, this looks like a giant, really awesome, custom ARM cluster that they want to do neural network stuff with.
If anyone from the team is here, I'd love to hear more about how this will be used. Specifically, how will you prevent SpiNNaker from going down the same path as the Connection Machine - (stops doing AI stuff because, say, geneticists want to use it for protein sequencing)? Why do you see this as the future over something like NVIDIA's new HGX-2 or clusters of TPUs?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine
[1] http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/architectu...
[2] http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/SpiNNchip/
[3] http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/hardware/i...