5,750 research outputs found
GeNN: a code generation framework for accelerated brain simulations
Large-scale numerical simulations of detailed brain circuit models are important for identifying hypotheses on brain functions and testing their consistency and plausibility. An ongoing challenge for simulating realistic models is, however, computational speed. In this paper, we present the GeNN (GPU-enhanced Neuronal Networks) framework, which aims to facilitate the use of graphics accelerators for computational models of large-scale neuronal networks to address this challenge. GeNN is an open source library that generates code to accelerate the execution of network simulations on NVIDIA GPUs, through a flexible and extensible interface, which does not require in-depth technical knowledge from the users. We present performance benchmarks showing that 200-fold speedup compared to a single core of a CPU can be achieved for a network of one million conductance based Hodgkin-Huxley neurons but that for other models the speedup can differ.
GeNN is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows platforms. The source code, user manual, tutorials,
Wiki, in-depth example projects and all other related information can be found on the project website http://genn-team.github.io/genn/
Simulating Spiking Neural P systems without delays using GPUs
We present in this paper our work regarding simulating a type of P system
known as a spiking neural P system (SNP system) using graphics processing units
(GPUs). GPUs, because of their architectural optimization for parallel
computations, are well-suited for highly parallelizable problems. Due to the
advent of general purpose GPU computing in recent years, GPUs are not limited
to graphics and video processing alone, but include computationally intensive
scientific and mathematical applications as well. Moreover P systems, including
SNP systems, are inherently and maximally parallel computing models whose
inspirations are taken from the functioning and dynamics of a living cell. In
particular, SNP systems try to give a modest but formal representation of a
special type of cell known as the neuron and their interactions with one
another. The nature of SNP systems allowed their representation as matrices,
which is a crucial step in simulating them on highly parallel devices such as
GPUs. The highly parallel nature of SNP systems necessitate the use of hardware
intended for parallel computations. The simulation algorithms, design
considerations, and implementation are presented. Finally, simulation results,
observations, and analyses using an SNP system that generates all numbers in
- {1} are discussed, as well as recommendations for future work.Comment: 19 pages in total, 4 figures, listings/algorithms, submitted at the
9th Brainstorming Week in Membrane Computing, University of Seville, Spai
NeuroFlow: A General Purpose Spiking Neural Network Simulation Platform using Customizable Processors
© 2016 Cheung, Schultz and Luk.NeuroFlow is a scalable spiking neural network simulation platform for off-the-shelf high performance computing systems using customizable hardware processors such as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Unlike multi-core processors and application-specific integrated circuits, the processor architecture of NeuroFlow can be redesigned and reconfigured to suit a particular simulation to deliver optimized performance, such as the degree of parallelism to employ. The compilation process supports using PyNN, a simulator-independent neural network description language, to configure the processor. NeuroFlow supports a number of commonly used current or conductance based neuronal models such as integrate-and-fire and Izhikevich models, and the spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) rule for learning. A 6-FPGA system can simulate a network of up to ~600,000 neurons and can achieve a real-time performance of 400,000 neurons. Using one FPGA, NeuroFlow delivers a speedup of up to 33.6 times the speed of an 8-core processor, or 2.83 times the speed of GPU-based platforms. With high flexibility and throughput, NeuroFlow provides a viable environment for large-scale neural network simulation
An ultra low-power hardware accelerator for automatic speech recognition
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, especially in the mobile segment. Fast and accurate ASR comes at a high energy cost which is not affordable for the tiny power budget of mobile devices. Hardware acceleration can reduce power consumption of ASR systems, while delivering high-performance. In this paper, we present an accelerator for large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition. It focuses on the Viterbi search algorithm, that represents the main bottleneck in an ASR system. The proposed design includes innovative techniques to improve the memory subsystem, since memory is identified as the main bottleneck for performance and power in the design of these accelerators. We propose a prefetching scheme tailored to the needs of an ASR system that hides main memory latency for a large fraction of the memory accesses with a negligible impact on area. In addition, we introduce a novel bandwidth saving technique that removes 20% of the off-chip memory accesses issued during the Viterbi search. The proposed design outperforms software implementations running on the CPU by orders of magnitude and achieves 1.7x speedup over a highly optimized CUDA implementation running on a high-end Geforce GTX 980 GPU, while reducing by two orders of magnitude (287x) the energy required to convert the speech into text.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
ChainQueen: A Real-Time Differentiable Physical Simulator for Soft Robotics
Physical simulators have been widely used in robot planning and control.
Among them, differentiable simulators are particularly favored, as they can be
incorporated into gradient-based optimization algorithms that are efficient in
solving inverse problems such as optimal control and motion planning.
Simulating deformable objects is, however, more challenging compared to rigid
body dynamics. The underlying physical laws of deformable objects are more
complex, and the resulting systems have orders of magnitude more degrees of
freedom and therefore they are significantly more computationally expensive to
simulate. Computing gradients with respect to physical design or controller
parameters is typically even more computationally challenging. In this paper,
we propose a real-time, differentiable hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian physical
simulator for deformable objects, ChainQueen, based on the Moving Least Squares
Material Point Method (MLS-MPM). MLS-MPM can simulate deformable objects
including contact and can be seamlessly incorporated into inference, control
and co-design systems. We demonstrate that our simulator achieves high
precision in both forward simulation and backward gradient computation. We have
successfully employed it in a diverse set of control tasks for soft robots,
including problems with nearly 3,000 decision variables.Comment: In submission to ICRA 2019. Supplemental Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IWD4iGIsB4 Project Page:
https://github.com/yuanming-hu/ChainQuee
Accelerating Eulerian Fluid Simulation With Convolutional Networks
Efficient simulation of the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid flow is a long
standing problem in applied mathematics, for which state-of-the-art methods
require large compute resources. In this work, we propose a data-driven
approach that leverages the approximation power of deep-learning with the
precision of standard solvers to obtain fast and highly realistic simulations.
Our method solves the incompressible Euler equations using the standard
operator splitting method, in which a large sparse linear system with many free
parameters must be solved. We use a Convolutional Network with a highly
tailored architecture, trained using a novel unsupervised learning framework to
solve the linear system. We present real-time 2D and 3D simulations that
outperform recently proposed data-driven methods; the obtained results are
realistic and show good generalization properties.Comment: Significant revisio
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