DeepSouth (neuromorphic supercomputer)

2023: Product Announcement

On December 13, 2023, Australian researchers at Western Sydney University reported the development of the world's first supercomputer capable of simulating pulsed neural networks at the scale of the human brain. A neuromorphic machine called DeepSouth is expected to be able to process huge amounts of data at high speed, while consuming much less power than conventional supercomputers.

Rapidly developing artificial intelligence applications require tremendous computing power. And this leads to a rapid increase in energy costs, which in many cases is accompanied by a negative impact on the environment. At the same time, the human brain is able to learn very quickly on small amounts of erratic noisy data and process the equivalent of a quintile of mathematical operations per second, while consuming only 20 watts of energy. Australian experts intend to implement such capabilities in the DeepSouth system.

DeepSouth

A neuromorphic supercomputer can perform approximately 228 trillion synaptic operations per second, comparable to a human brain. The platform has a modular architecture and is based on commercially available equipment, and therefore the DeepSouth configuration can be changed to perform certain tasks. By mimicking the brain's capabilities, the researchers expect to create better ways to realize AI.

This platform will improve our understanding of the structure of the human brain and develop next-generation computing systems for various fields, including sensorics, biomedicine, robotics, space and large-scale artificial intelligence applications, says Professor André van Schaik, one of the authors of the work.[1]

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