Livermore National Lab to test IBM’s brain-inspired computer chip

IEEE Spectrum : Six years ago, IBM began work on a highly parallelized, low-energy computer chip—dubbed TrueNorth—that was inspired by the behavior of the human brain. In 2014, researchers completed the first of those 5.4-billion-transistor chips, which consume just 70 mW of electricity at peak operation. Now, the company has combined 16 of the chips into a single computer and sent it to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for testing. Researchers at the lab, which is home to several of the world’s fastest supercomputers, will evaluate the technology to determine its potential usefulness for a variety of applications, particularly pattern recognition. Because supercomputers consume a lot of energy, the fact that TrueNorth uses significantly less power than conventional computer chips, even when it works on the most difficult tasks, could make it a key component in the development of exascale computing.