TY - JOUR AU - Cheung, Kit AU - Schultz, Simon R. AU - Luk, Wayne PY - 2016 M3 - Original Research TI - NeuroFlow: A General Purpose Spiking Neural Network Simulation Platform using Customizable Processors JO - Frontiers in Neuroscience UR - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2015.00516 VL - 9 SN - 1662-453X N2 - NeuroFlow is a scalable spiking neural network simulation platform for off-the-shelf high performance computing systems using customizable hardware processors such as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Unlike multi-core processors and application-specific integrated circuits, the processor architecture of NeuroFlow can be redesigned and reconfigured to suit a particular simulation to deliver optimized performance, such as the degree of parallelism to employ. The compilation process supports using PyNN, a simulator-independent neural network description language, to configure the processor. NeuroFlow supports a number of commonly used current or conductance based neuronal models such as integrate-and-fire and Izhikevich models, and the spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) rule for learning. A 6-FPGA system can simulate a network of up to ~600,000 neurons and can achieve a real-time performance of 400,000 neurons. Using one FPGA, NeuroFlow delivers a speedup of up to 33.6 times the speed of an 8-core processor, or 2.83 times the speed of GPU-based platforms. With high flexibility and throughput, NeuroFlow provides a viable environment for large-scale neural network simulation. ER -