Neural network chip built using memristors
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The idea, and this can be seen on DARPA's slides (http://www.darpa.mil/workarea/downloadasset.aspx?id=21474857...), is to get computation that is several orders of magnitude higher for their specialized sets of problems than what can theoretically be reached by traditional computing models even if Moore's law continues.
DARPA would like to first apply this technology to ARGUS drone systems (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGxNyaXfJsA) and related technology because streaming video can't be done to the ground, tracking and decision making must be done on board - yet traditional processing platforms can only track a few orders of magnitude fewer targets that what the military would like.
In a more advanced phase, if memristor or coupled oscillator (etc) approaches to building inference models become possible, then programs written in DARPA's other initiative (Probablistic Programming) could be programmed into these exotic solid state devices to compute in a way more analogous to today's generic computation. And indeed, eventually the adoption of Probablistic Programming will train programmers to write code for quantum computers - while more complicated, replacing Probablistic Programming's PDFs with probability amplitudes almost get one there.
I hope to see more journalistic coverage of some of the other exotic devices.
And about journalistic coverage... you seem to be knowledgeable about these programs, so there's an opportunity for you :)
Furthermore, there is a huge amount of open access journal articles and wikipedia material on memristors. DARPA is nowhere close to the cutting edge, SK Hynix is already tooling ReRAM fabs for mass production.
[1]: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/full/nature0...
This is so amazing! Btw. I have found an HP Invent sign in my town, but the security guard didn't answer any questions about it. The only thing he said was that I won't find any address or telephone number for it. That made me curious, because HP is working on a memristor based Computer, but I doubt that they produce it in Germany.
This type of work all about mass fabrication, but has nothing to do with AI models. Which direction you want to go?
They "backdoor listed" on to an Australian mining company, share price went from 1 cent to 27 cents: https://www.google.com/finance?cid=11163357
Valued at $57m.
Second, you can implement a convnet with a spiking circuit: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11263-014-0788-3
A convnet-optimized chip could clearly be much faster and more power efficient than a convnet running on a CPU or GPU. The move from CPU to GPU brought a 10x speedup already, but GPUs are hardly ideal for running convnets. For one thing, they have tons of graphics-specific hardware that's useless for convnets and could just be deleted in a convnet chip. For another, GPUs are much more flexible than necessary for convnets. The main operation you need to perform is convolution and you could make fixed-function convolution units that would be much more power and area efficient than generalized GPU shader cores. For yet another thing, there's no reason to believe that 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point is the best power/precision tradeoff for convnets. I'm willing to bet that you could go much lower. You could even experiment with approximate arithmetic; 0.5 ULP precision is probably not necessary.
Moreover, building such a chip is an expensive and long process, and given how fast GPUs are improving, it's not clear that by the time you build it, it will still be competitive.
Finally, if you want to speed up training, try to figure out a better algorithm. For example, humans can learn from very few training examples. Current neural networks need many thousands, or even millions. There's a potential million-fold speed up in training time right here - and to find it, you need the flexibility of the software.
I feel that I need to emphasize that. The memristor is the component that will easily allow for analog logic to occur at digital speeds and with digital logic type systems (very grossly speaking). What these little guys can do is under-sold.
There is a lesson from IBM trying to mimic a rat's brain -- that is you try to solve a problem rather than just burn power.
Better than what?
For example, to simulate a horse, is it necessary to create legs, or is it okay to build a road and use wheels?
The reason I mention it is that memristors are being accused of being vaporware when really they're in production already.
Wow - seems like a lot.
Human brain by comparison (sourced by google): - 12 watts - 100 billion neurons - 1000 trillion connections
Computing with memsisters is going to be very interesting.
If they can ever fabricate such a thing ... those neural networks are going to compute some scary stuff!
Do we have to pay extra for Austrian accent?
The article cites 250 billion synapses per watt.
For the same 12 watts as a human brain eats up, a set of memristors could simulate three trillion synapses. A cat, in comparison, has 10 trillion. To get 100 trillion synapses, multiply those 12 watts by 33.3 to get 400 watts (the draw of nearly seven 60-watt incandescent bulbs).
Since one watt bags us 250 billion synapses and 400 watts is equivalent to a memristor-based human brain, then 400 cm^2 is the area needed to emulate the meekest of human minds.
That's nearly the same area as half of a medium Domino's pizza.
Certainly is... food for thought.
The numbers are interesting, though. 400 square centimetres sounds to me to be in the ballpark of a human brain (accounting for several layers).
And I immediately imagined drones going around the landing gears of bigger planes demanding their attention...
Just as a note: we are not sure whether that large computer really simulated brain activity or not. The tricky thing in brain research is that we have practically zero* idea about what matters and what can be omitted from the simulation. (For example, the glia cells seem to be important -- until recently, we have disregarded their role.)
So at this point even we had an infinitely big computer we could not simulate the brain properly because we don't know what exactly to simulate.
*zero means that there's much more we don't know than what we know.
Not really a fair comparison. That's like simulating one processor with another and complaining that 1 second of activity took 40 minutes to simulate. If we can implement the NN directly, rather than simulate it, we should expect a much smaller performance gap.
If your calculations are correct, that doesn't sound so bad. If we could implement a brain-sized (by number of neurons) neural network in the area as half of a medium Domino's pizza, that seems like a damn good achievement to me!
Neuroscience is already bored with not only subsystems, the holistic nature of the brain, but also the notion of the brain as the body's sole processor of cognition.