German neuromorphic supercomputing company SpiNNcloud Systems GmbH today announced that Sandia National Laboratories has officially deployed its new SpiNNaker2 brain-inspired supercomputer, marking a significant milestone in the advancement of computing for national security applications.

Sandia National Laboratories is a U.S. government research and development facility specializing in national security, energy and advanced technology innovation. Run by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, Sandia is best known for its role in ensuring the safety, security and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.

The SpiNNaker2 brain-inspired supercomputer was announced by SpiNNcloud in May 2024 and offers a supercomputer-level hybrid artificial intelligence high-performance neuromorphic computer system based on principles of the human brain. The SpiNNAker2 supercomputing platform was pioneered by Steve Furber, the designer of the original Arm and SpiNNaker1 architectures and uses numerous low-power processors to efficiently compute AI and other workloads.

Neuromorphic computing is a semiconductor design approach focused on building computer chips that function more like the human brain. The idea is that by adding more neurons inside a chip, it becomes more powerful. The approach draws on neuroscience insights that integrate memory and compute with highly granular parallelism to minimize data movement.

SpiNNaker2 is now operational at Sandia National Laboratories and ranks among the top five largest brain-inspired computing platforms globally, simulating between 150 million and 180 million neurons.

“Although GPU-based systems can boost the efficiency of supercomputers by processing highly parallel and math-intensive workloads much faster than CPUs, brain-inspired systems, like the SpiNNaker2 system, offer an enticing alternative,” explains Craig M. Vineyard, Ph.D., research scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. “The new system delivers both impressive performance and substantial efficiency gains concurrently to Sandia’s neuromorphic capabilities.”

The SpiNNaker2 system employs a highly parallel architecture consisting of 48 SpiNNaker2 chips per server board, each containing 152 Arm-based cores and specialized accelerators. The design delivers efficient, event-driven computation that allows the system to perform complex simulations at a lower energy profile compared to traditional GPU-based systems.

“Our vision is to pioneer the future of artificial intelligence through brain-inspired supercomputer technology for next-generation defense and beyond,” said Hector A. Gonzalez, co-founder and chief executive officer of SpiNNcloud. “The SpiNNaker2’s efficiency gains make it particularly well-suited for the demanding computational needs of national security applications.”

Looking ahead, SpiNNcloud says that it is also enabling support for the next generation of generative AI algorithms, paving a radically more efficient path to machine learning advancement through dynamic sparsity.

Photo: SpiNNcloud Systems