ComBra Lab receives two new Intel Loihi neuromorphic chips, a "Nahuku" 32-chip and a "Nahuku" 8-chip, that will serve the Lab's research and educational activities. The 40 neuromorphic chips add to the "Kapoho-Bay" 2-chip equipment that the Lab has been having since 2018, based on an ongoing grant that recently got renewed. With this new addition, the total processing power increased from 262,000 to 5,200,000 neurons, which is equivalent to the number of neurons found in a zebrafish brain.
Loihi is a neuromorphic research test chip designed by Intel Labs that uses an asynchronous spiking neural network (SNN) to implement adaptive self-modifying event-driven fine-grained parallel computations used to implement learning and inference with high efficiency. The chip is a 128-neuromorphic cores many-core IC fabricated on Intel's 14 nm process and features a unique programmable microcode learning engine for on-chip SNN training.
Our Lab is one of the handful research areas that has cloud-based and physical access to Loihi chips and the new addition will make the Lab one of the most well-equipped research sites for neuromorphic computing in the world. The $140K equipment is under a loan from Intel Labs.
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