[gnufx]

I haven't had a chance to go back and read the literature or talk to people more deeply, but what I've heard about SpiNNaker recently in conversation and semi-technical talks has been confusing when it comes to comparisons. The distinguishing features as presented are things I expect of large HPC systems.

I don't mean SpiNNaker isn't interesting, and I've been pointing it out as such for years but it's been basically unknown even relatively locally.

[dkfellows]

It's basically very different in approach to many modern computers. The cores are slow and low-powered, but the interconnect is very fast for routing small packets to multiple destinations, which means that computational tasks that would otherwise be utterly dominated by communication costs (e.g., neural simulations) become a lot more tractable.

But since it's all done in soft realtime with very low level code (and no hardware floats in the current hardware generation) and not much of an OS, it's a very unusual platform for people to work with. Much more like programming used to be like in the 1980s, if my memory serves me right. (One of the key distinguishing things about SpiNNaker in the field of neuromorphic systems is that actually has an OS at all. Most competitor systems are purely bare metal, as they're put together by deep hardware hackers without consulting software engineers.)