Beyond von Neumann, Neuromorphic Computing Steadily Advances

Neuromorphic computing – brain inspired computing – has long been a tantalizing goal. The human brain does with around 20 watts what supercomputers do with megawatts. While neuromorphic computing progress has been intriguing, it has still not proven very practical. This week neuromorphic computing takes another step forward with a workshop being offered to users from academia, industry and education interested in using two European neuromorphic systems that have been years in development and are coming online for broader use – the BrainScaleS system launching at the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics of Heidelberg University and SpiNNaker, a complementary approach and similarly sized system at the University of Manchester. Ramping up BrainScaleS and SpiNNaker is an important milestone, strengthening Europe's position in hardware development for alternative computing. Both projects are part of the European Human Brain Project, originally funded by the European Commission's Future Emerging Technologies program (2005-2015).