- Spinnaker 2 Supercomputer works without disks or an operating system for unmatched speed
- Sandia’s system uses 152 cores per day. Chip to mimic parallelism in the human brain
- With 138,240 terabyte dram is spinnaker 2 completely dependent on the memory speed
A new computer system modeled after the architecture of the human brain has been activated at Sandia National Laboratories in the US state of New Mexico.
Spinnaker 2 is developed by Germany-based SpinnCloud and stands out not only from its neuromorphic design, but also for its radical absence of an operating system or internal warehouse.
Supported by the National Nuclear Security Administration Advanced Simulation and Computer Program, the system marks a remarkable development in the effort to use brain-inspired machines for national security applications.
Spinnaker 2 differs from conventional supercomputers
Unlike conventional supercomputers that depend on GPUs and centralized disk storage, Spinnaker 2 architecture is designed to function more like the human brain using event-driven calculation and parallel treatment.
Each spinnaker 2 -chip carries 152 cores and specialized accelerators with 48 chips per day. Server card. A fully configured system contains up to 1,440 boards, 69,120 chips and 138,240 terabyte dram.
These numbers point to a system that is not only large but built for a very different kind of performance, one related to the speed of DRAM rather than traditional disk -based I/O.
In this design, the system’s speed is attributed to data that is completely retained in SRAM and DRAM, a feature that SpinnCloud insists is crucial, which says: “The supercomputer is connected to existing HPC systems and does not contain any operating system or disc. The speed is generated by storing data in SRAM and DRAM.”
SpinnCloud also claims that standard parallel ethernet ports are “sufficient to load/store the data”, which suggests minimally need for the detailed storage frames typically found in high-preparation computing.
The real implications still remain speculative. Spinnaker 2 system simulates between 150 and 180 million neurons, impressive, yet modest compared to the estimated 100 billion neurons of the human brain.
The original spinnaker concept was developed by Steve Furber, a key figure in Arm’s history, and this latest iteration seems to be a commercial culmination of this idea.
Still, the true performance and usability of the system in the real world to be demonstrated with high stakes to be demonstrated.
“Spinnaker 2’s efficiency gains make it particularly suitable for the demanding calculation needs for national security applications,” said Hector A. Gonzalez, co -founder and CEO of SpinnCloud, and emphasized its potential use in “next generation defense and beyond.”
Despite such statements, whether neuromorphic systems like Spinnaker 2 can deliver their promises outside specialized contexts are still an open question.
Currently, Sandia’s activation of the system marks a quiet but potentially important step in the developing cross between neuroscience and supercomputing.
Via Blocks & Files
