- Spinnaker 2 Supercomuter works without discs or an operating system for unparalleled speed
- The watermelon system uses 152 cores per chip to imitate the parallelism of the human brain
- With 138,240 Terabytes de DRAM, Spinnaker 2 is completely based on the speed of memory
A new computing system modeling after human brain architecture has been activated in Sandia’s national laboratories in the American state of New Mexico.
Developed by Spinncloud, based in Germany, Spinnaker 2 stands out not only for its neuromorphic design, but also for its radical absence of an operating system or internal storage.
Backed by the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program of the National Nuclear Safety Administration, the system marks a notable development in the effort to use machines inspired by the brain for national security applications.
Spinnaker 2 differs from conventional supercomputer
Unlike conventional supercomputers that depend on GPUs and centralized disc storage, Spinnaker 2 architecture is designed to function more as the human brain, using the calculation based on events and parallel processing.
Each spinnaker 2 chip carries 152 specialized nuclei and accelerators, with 48 chips per server plate. A fully configured system contains up to 1,440 boards, 69,120 chips and 138,240 Terabytes de Dram.
These figures point to a system that is not only large but is built for a very different type of performance, one that depends on the speed in DRAM instead of the I/Os based on the traditional album.
In this design, the speed of the system is attributed to the data that are completely preserved in SRAM and DRAM, a feature insists on Spinncloud is crucial, indicating: “The supercomputer is tilted in existing HPC systems and does not contain any operating system or disc. The speed is generated by keeping the data in the SRAM and dram.”
Spinncloud also states that the standard parallel Ethernet ports are “enough to load/save the data”, which suggests a minimum need for the storage frames elaborated that are typically found in high performance computing.
Even so, real implications remain speculative. The Spinnaker 2 system simulates between 150 and 180 million neurons, impressive, but modest compared to the 100 billion estimated neurons of the human brain.
The original Spinnaker concept was developed by Steve Furber, a key figure in the history of ARM, and this last iteration seems to be a commercial culmination of that idea.
However, the real performance and usefulness of the system in high -risk applications of the real world have not yet been demonstrated.
“Spinnaker 2 efficiency profits make it particularly suitable for the demanding computational needs of national security applications,” said Héctor A. González, co -founder and CEO of Spinncloud, emphasizing its potential use in “next generation defense and beyond.”
Despite such statements, if neuromorphic systems such as Spinnaker 2 can fulfill their promises outside specialized contexts remains an open question.
For now, the Sandia activation of the system marks a quiet but potentially important step at the evolutionary intersection of neuroscience and supercomputing.
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