Pohoiki Springs: Intel neuromorphic research system unleashes the power of 100 million neurons

Intel announced that it has prepared Pohoiki Springs, its latest and most powerful neuro-morphic research system. And not only that, it has the processing power of a hundred million neurons.

The cloud-based system will be available to members of Intel’s neuromorphic research community (CINI) and will enhance their neuromorphic work to solve larger and more complex problems.

“Pohoiki Springs extends our neuromorphic research capabilities in Loihi by more than 750 times and operates at less than 500 watts. The system allows our researchers to explore ways to accelerate workloads that run slowly on conventional architectures, including high-performance computing systems,” said Mike Davies, director of Intel’s Neuromorphic Computing Laboratory.

Pohoiki Springs is the largest neuromorphic computing system developed by Intel to date. It integrates 768 Loihi neuromorphic research chips into a chassis the size of five standard servers.

The Loihi processors are inspired by the human brain. Like the latter, the Loihi processors can handle demanding workloads up to a thousand times faster and ten thousand times more efficiently than conventional processors.

With 100 million neurons, Pohoiki Springs increases the neural capacity of the Loihi processors to the capacity of a small mammal’s brain, an important step towards supporting much larger and more demanding neuro-morphic workloads. The system lays the foundation for a networked and autonomous future that requires new ways of dynamic real-time data processing.