Link: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212200673

Dr. Snider and his colleagues at HP have built an integrated hybrid circuit with both transistors and memristors. Memristor crossbars are a very promising technology that can ultimately lead to building very dense hybrid chips, several times denser than synapses in the human cortex. Also, memristors have shown the potential to mimic the learning functions of synapses in neural networks. Memristors will the key technology that HP and its academic partner, Boston University, will leverage in the SyNAPSE grant.

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On November 20, 2008, the NY Times has published a short article entitled “Hunting for a Brainy Computer”. Steve Lohr interviews the leader of the IBM team. IBM’s Blue Gene has been used to simulate large-scale neural models (see the Blue Brain Project, led by Henry Markram). However, it is easy to mix supercomputers, IBM, and SyNAPSE in a big pot, thinking that they are the same. In reality, the Blue Gene is the example of how not to simulate the brain. This machine, as large as a room, whose power consumption is the same as the sum of the brains of a small city, can barely simulate a cortical column. As this article does not stress much (unlike other cited in this blog), the hardware problem will be solved (hopefully) by nanotechnologies, in particular by porting to nano the immense number of synapses that will link the millions of neurons implemented in the chip. No comment on “Dorothy looking for the Wizard of Oz” and “Want a really intelligent digital assistant”… It is worth mentioning that even with a chip twice the density and half the power consumption that the one SyNAPSE seeks to have in seven years available TODAY in the hands of the best modelers in the world, it is hard to think that we have the necessary modeling skills to implement that is suggested below.

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HP memristor ...in perspective

IEEE Spectrum online. Again, IBM appears all over the news. One of the main misconceptions of SyNAPSE is that, imagining of course the 3 companies involved in SyNAPSE succeed, the resulting chip will automatically result in better “MRAPs, UAVs, Mars Rovers”. This is of course not true. A very dense neural chip is 1/2 of the story. The ingredient that SyNAPSE needs to succeed is having meaningful neural models implemented on the chip. And this is where the other 1/2 of the competition will lie in the long (7 years) program.

IBM Researchers Look to Build ‘Global Brain’ Computer

IT Infrastructure
By Scott Ferguson
2008-11-20

IBM is awarded one of the SyNAPSE grants

IBM researchers and scientists from several major universities, with the aid of a $4.9 million grant from DARPA, will look to use nanoscale technology to create new types of computers capable of cognitive thinking. The goal of the IBM research is to find whether new types of IT infrastructure and computers can not only collect data but use that data to solve problems and make decisions in the same way the human brain solves problems.
While a computer with artificial intelligence such as HAL of “2001: A Space Odyssey” remains the stuff of science fiction, IBM researchers are looking to develop technologies that will bring cognitive abilities to a new class of computers.
IBM researchers, along with scientists from several major universities, have been awarded a $4.9 million grant from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to see if they can develop computers with the ability to not only collect data but solve problems in much the same way a human brain does.

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