Verification of a neuromorphic computing network simulator using experimental traffic data

Abstract

Simulations are a powerful tool to explore the design space of hardware systems, offering the flexibility to analyze different designs by simply changing parameters within the simulator setup. A precondition for the effectiveness of this methodology is that the simulation results accurately represent the real system. In a previous study, we introduced a simulator specifically designed to estimate the network load and latency to be observed on the connections in neuromorphic computing (NC) systems. The simulator was shown to be especially valuable in the case of large scale heterogeneous neural networks (NNs). In this work, we compare the network load measured on a SpiNNaker board running a NN in different configurations reported in the literature to the results obtained with our simulator running the same configurations. The simulated network loads show minor differences from the values reported in the ascribed publication but fall within the margin of error, considering the generation of the test case NN based on statistics that introduced variations. Having shown that the network simulator provides representative results for this type of —biological plausible—heterogeneous NNs, it also paves the way to further use of the simulator for more complex network analyses.

neuroAIx-Framework: design of future neuroscience simulation systems exhibiting execution of the cortical microcircuit model 20× faster than biological real-time

“…In our previous work, we studied suitable communication architectures-a major bottleneck in accelerated simulation of large-scale networks-utilizing the static and dynamic simulators (Kauth et al, 2020). Similarly, Kleijnen et al (2022) focused on simulation regarding heterogeneous neural networks and corresponding mapping algorithms. However, this work extends this to the characterization of all relevant building blocks that are necessary for a dedicated neuroscience simulation system, and sketches their implementation in the presented evaluation platform.…”