[dkfellows]

SpiNNaker is particularly for studying neural structure, especially on the scale from small groups of neurons up to brain structures of a few million, on timespans of a few seconds to a few hours at simulation timesteps on the size order of a millisecond. That's a scale where doing the study in vivo or in vitro is technically extremely challenging; signal analysers find that awkward, either to get that many channels that fine or to get that density of sampling. Or both; getting either is hard and getting both is crazy hard.

But being able to simulate neural networks that can do their learning on-line and in real time, all while actively processing input (and in a controlled fashion) is an interesting capability anyway, as it means SpiNNaker can control physical robots in interesting ways (and those may be commercially interesting). And it's low-power enough that doing this in the wild is practical, rather than needing to upload everything into the Cloud for analysis. That may also be commercially interesting.