131 research outputs found
Test Infrastructure for Address-Event-Representation Communications
Address-Event-Representation (AER) is a communication protocol
for transferring spikes between bio-inspired chips. Such systems may consist of
a hierarchical structure with several chips that transmit spikes among them in
real time, while performing some processing. To develop and test AER based
systems it is convenient to have a set of instruments that would allow to:
generate AER streams, monitor the output produced by neural chips and modify
the spike stream produced by an emitting chip to adapt it to the requirements of
the receiving elements. In this paper we present a set of tools that implement
these functions developed in the CAVIAR EU project.Unión Europea IST-2001-34124 (CAVIAR)Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC-2003-08164-C03-0
AER Neuro-Inspired interface to Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand
Address-Event-Representation (AER) is a
communication protocol for transferring asynchronous events
between VLSI chips, originally developed for neuro-inspired
processing systems (for example, image processing). Such
systems may consist of a complicated hierarchical structure
with many chips that transmit data among them in real time,
while performing some processing (for example, convolutions).
The information transmitted is a sequence of spikes coded using
high speed digital buses. These multi-layer and multi-chip AER
systems perform actually not only image processing, but also
audio processing, filtering, learning, locomotion, etc. This paper
present an AER interface for controlling an anthropomorphic
robotic hand with a neuro-inspired system.Unión Europea IST-2001-34124 (CAVIAR)Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC-2003-08164-C03-02Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC2000-0406-P4- 0
Neuro-Inspired Real-Time USB & PCI to AER Interfaces for Vision Processing
Address-Event-Representation (AER) is an emergent neuromorphic interchip communication protocol that allows for real-time virtual massive connectivity between huge number neurons located on different chips. By exploiting high speed digital communication circuits (with nanoseconds timings), synaptic neural connections can be time multiplexed, while neural activity signals (with mili-seconds timings) are sampled at low frequencies. When building multi-chip muti-layered AER systems it is absolutely necessary to have a computer interface that allows (a) to read AER interchip traffic into the computer and visualize it on screen, and (b) convert conventional frame-based video stream in the computer into AER and inject it at some point of the AER structure. This is necessary for test and debugging of complex AER systems.
This paper describes a set of PC interfaces to neuroinspired systems, analyses the performance and power consumption. The interfaces use PCI or USB bus connections that have been developed under an EU project, where they have been tested in a stressed situation.Ministerio de Ciencia y Educación TEC2006-11730-C03-02 (SAMANTA 2)Ministerio de Ciencia y Educación TIN2006- 15617-C03-03Junta de Andalucía P06-TIC-01417Commission of the European Communities IST-2001- 3412
Time-Recovering PCI-AER interface for Bio-inspired Spiking Systems
Address Event Representation (AER) is an emergent neuromorphic interchip communication protocol that allows
for real-time virtual massive connectivity between huge number neurons located on different chips. By exploiting
high speed digital communication circuits (with nano-seconds timings), synaptic neural connections can be time
multiplexed, while neural activity signals (with mili-seconds timings) are sampled at low frequencies. Also,
neurons generate ‘events’ according to their activity levels. More active neurons generate more events per unit
time, and access the interchip communication channel more frequently, while neurons with low activity
consume less communication bandwidth. When building multi-chip muti-layered AER systems it is absolutely
necessary to have a computer interface that allows (a) to read AER interchip traffic into the computer and visualize it
on screen, and (b) inject a sequence of events at some point of the AER structure. This is necessary for testing and
debugging complex AER systems.
This paper presents a PCI to AER interface, that dispatches a sequence of events received from the PCI bus
with embedded timing information to establish when each event will be delivered. A set of specialized states
machines has been introduced to recovery the possible time delays introduced by the asynchronous AER bus. On the
input channel, the interface capture events assigning a timestamp and delivers them through the PCI bus to MATLAB
applications. It has been implemented in real time hardware using VHDL and it has been tested in a PCI-AER
board, developed by authors, that includes a Spartan II 200 FPGA. The demonstration hardware is currently
capable to send and receive events at a peak rate of 8,3 Mev/sec, and a typical rate of 1 Mev/sec.European Commission IST-2001-34124Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIC-2000-0406-P
APEnet+: a 3D toroidal network enabling Petaflops scale Lattice QCD simulations on commodity clusters
Many scientific computations need multi-node parallelism for matching up both
space (memory) and time (speed) ever-increasing requirements. The use of GPUs
as accelerators introduces yet another level of complexity for the programmer
and may potentially result in large overheads due to the complex memory
hierarchy. Additionally, top-notch problems may easily employ more than a
Petaflops of sustained computing power, requiring thousands of GPUs
orchestrated with some parallel programming model. Here we describe APEnet+,
the new generation of our interconnect, which scales up to tens of thousands of
nodes with linear cost, thus improving the price/performance ratio on large
clusters. The project target is the development of the Apelink+ host adapter
featuring a low latency, high bandwidth direct network, state-of-the-art wire
speeds on the links and a PCIe X8 gen2 host interface. It features hardware
support for the RDMA programming model and experimental acceleration of GPU
networking. A Linux kernel driver, a set of low-level RDMA APIs and an OpenMPI
library driver are available, allowing for painless porting of standard
applications. Finally, we give an insight of future work and intended
developments
PCI-AER interface for Neuro-inspired Spiking Systems
Address event representation (AER) is a neuromorphic interchip communication protocol that allows for real-time connectivity between huge number neurons located on different chips. By exploiting high speed digital communication circuits (nano-seconds), synaptic neural connections can be time multiplexed (mili-seconds). When building multi-chip muti-layered AER systems it is absolutely necessary to have a computer interface that allows: (a) to read AER interchip traffic; and (b) inject a sequence of events to the AER structure. This paper presents a PCI to AER interface, that dispatches a sequence of events with timing information. It is able to recovery the possible delays introduced by AER bus. It has been implemented in real time hardware using VHDL and tested in a PCI-AER board, developed by authors, that currently capable to send and receive events at a peak rate of 16 Mev/sec, and a typical rate of 10 Mev/secEuropean Commission IST-2001-34124Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC-2003-08164-C03-0
APEnet+: high bandwidth 3D torus direct network for petaflops scale commodity clusters
We describe herein the APElink+ board, a PCIe interconnect adapter featuring
the latest advances in wire speed and interface technology plus hardware
support for a RDMA programming model and experimental acceleration of GPU
networking; this design allows us to build a low latency, high bandwidth PC
cluster, the APEnet+ network, the new generation of our cost-effective,
tens-of-thousands-scalable cluster network architecture. Some test results and
characterization of data transmission of a complete testbench, based on a
commercial development card mounting an Altera FPGA, are provided.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, proceeding of CHEP 2010, Taiwan, October 18-2
Describing the FPGA-Based Hardware Architecture of Systemic Computation (HAoS)
his paper presents HAoS, the first hardware architecture of the bio-inspired computational paradigm known as Systemic Computation (SC). SC was designed to support the modelling of biological processes inherently by defining a massively parallel non-conventional computer architecture and a model of natural behaviour. In this work we describe a novel custom digital design, which addresses the SC architecture parallelism requirement by exploiting the inbuilt parallelism of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and by using the highly efficient matching capability of a Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM). Basic processing capabilities are embedded in HAoS in order to minimize time-demanding data transfers. Its custom instruction set can be expanded based on user requirements, since the optional use of a CPU provides high-level processing support if required. We demonstrate a functional simulation-verified prototype, which takes into consideration programmability and scalability, and review various communication interfaces between HAoS and the CPU. Analysis shows that the proposed architecture provides an effective solution in terms of efficiency versus flexibility trade-off and can potentially outperform prior implementations
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