China successfully built a computer capable of processing the equivalent of a mouse brain

Tram Ho

A team of scientists from Zhejiang University and Zhejiang Laboratory (China) have successfully built a Darwin Mouse – a computer capable of simulating the brain according to the number of neurons. Accordingly, Darwin Mouse uses 792 individually designed chips, containing millions of artificial neurons needed to “mimic” the nerve cells found in the real brain.

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The Darwin Mouse computer has the same processing power as a mouse brain

Essentially, neuromorphic computing is a very new field in computer science. Scientists will develop a computer capable of simulating human brain activities, which allows us to process information using neurons, synapses, and neural circuits. business and more.

If successfully developed, computers equipped with neuromorphic computing technology will help us take a big step towards the development of artificial intelligence. Typically, AI requires computers to be able to compute data intensively. To be able to complete AI-related tasks, traditional computers consume a lot of storage capacity and energy. Neuromorphic computers are thought to fix the above problems.

It’s like where information is stored in one place and when you want to do a calculation, you move it to another place, then move it back to the original position after the calculation is done ,” Pan Gang , lead researcher, professor at Zhejiang University, said. ” However, the information transmission rate is much lower than the computational speed. This is the point that causes the bottleneck.

In this respect, the human brain is far superior to the most advanced computers in the world today. Our brains can process and store information in one place – in the millions of connections between neurons called synapses. Researchers are hoping they can create neural chips that work in a similar way, helping to improve performance and significantly reduce energy consumption.

It is known that the chip used in the Darwin Mouse computer is called a Darwin 2 Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Each chip is capable of processing data equivalent to 150,000 artificial neurons. To be able to achieve the processing power equivalent to a mouse brain, Chinese scientists have to integrate up to hundreds of Darwin 2 Neural Processing Unit chips.

Trung Quốc chế tạo thành công máy tính có khả năng xử lý tương đương não một con chuột - Ảnh 2.

Each Darwin 2 Neural Processing Unit chip is capable of processing data equivalent to 150,000 artificial neurons

Thanks to this enormous number of CPUs, the Darwin Mouse computer contains up to 120 million neurons and 100 billion synapses – the equivalent of the number of neurons in the brain of a mouse.

In addition, the Darwin Mouse project development team has also developed DarwinOS, an operating system for brain simulation computer systems.

“We will continue to develop a line of computers that simulate the Darwin brain so that we can achieve the same processing capabilities as the human brain, providing more powerful AI with extremely low power consumption,” said the group’s representative. development said.

Not only China, a number of other countries are also embarking on the process of developing brain simulation computers. In the UK, scientists at the University of Manchester have developed a supercomputer called SpiNNaker, short for Spiking Neural Network Architecture. Meanwhile, big technology firms like Intel, IBM have also been designing specialized hardware for brain simulation computers.

Refer to SCMP

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Source : Genk