title: Performance/price estimates for cortex-scale hardware: a design space exploration.
abstract: In this paper, we revisit the concept of virtualization. Virtualization is useful for understanding and investigating the performance/price and other trade-offs related to the hardware design space. Moreover, it is perhaps the most important aspect of a hardware design space exploration. Such a design space exploration is a necessary part of the study of hardware architectures for large-scale computational models for intelligent computing, including AI, Bayesian, bio-inspired and neural models. A methodical exploration is needed to identify potentially interesting regions in the design space, and to assess the relative performance/price points of these implementations. As an example, in this paper we investigate the performance/price of (digital and mixed-signal) CMOS and hypothetical CMOL (nanogrid) technology based hardware implementations of human cortex-scale spiking neural systems. Through this analysis, and the resulting performance/price points, we demonstrate, in general, the importance of virtualization, and of doing these kinds of design space explorations. The specific results suggest that hybrid nanotechnology such as CMOL is a promising candidate to implement very large-scale spiking neural systems, providing a more efficient utilization of the density and storage benefits of emerging nano-scale technologies. In general, we believe that the study of such hypothetical designs/architectures will guide the neuromorphic hardware community towards building large-scale systems, and help guide research trends in intelligent computing, and computer engineering.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, Portland State University, Portland, OR, United States. mazadic@gmail.com
authors.forename: Mazad S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Zaveri
authors.forename: Dan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Hammerstrom
mesh_terms: D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D003198:Computer Simulation / Q000592:standards*; D003201:Computers / Q000191:economics* / Q000639:trends*; D004867:Equipment Design / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D014584:User-Computer Interface