Biologically-Inspired Massively Parallel Architectures - computing beyond a million processors

人类的大脑仍然是科学的一个伟大的前沿--这个我们都如此依赖的器官实际上是如何工作的？我们对神经元这一底层技术已经有了很多了解，我们可以通过磁共振成像等技术观察大规模的大脑活动，但这些知识几乎无法告诉我们大脑是如何工作的。我们还没有开始理解在中间处理层次发生的一些事情，但是大脑信息处理功能的本质可能就在这些中间层次。为了达到这些中间层，我们需要建立一个非常大的神经元系统模型，其结构受到神经科学越来越详细的发现的启发，以研究这些系统的涌现行为，适应性和容错性。我们在这个项目中的目标是提供前所未有的成本效益机器来完成这项任务，并使它们易于为尽可能广泛的用户群所使用。我们还将探讨在追求这一目标的过程中出现的独特体系结构对其他重要应用领域的适用性。

The human brain remains as one of the great frontiers of science - how does this organ upon which we all depend so critically actually do its job? A great deal is known about the underlying technology - the neuron - and we can observe large-scale brain activity through techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging, but this knowledge barely starts to tell us how the brain works. Something is happening at the intermediate levels of processing that we have yet to begin to understand, but the essence of the brain's information processing function probably lies in these intermediate levels. To get at these middle layers requires that we build models of very large systems of spiking neurons, with structures inspired by the increasingly detailed findings of neuroscience, in order to investigate the emergent behaviours, adaptability and fault-tolerance of those systems.Our goal in this project is to deliver machines of unprecedented cost-effectiveness for this task, and to make them readily accessible to as wide a user base as possible. We will also explore the applicability of the unique architecture that has emerged from the pursuit of this goal to other important application domains.