Neuromorphic algorithms on clusters of PlayStation 3s

There is a significant interest in the research community to develop large scale, high performance implementations of neuromorphic models. These have the potential to provide significantly stronger information processing capabilities than current computing algorithms. In this paper we present the implementation of five neuromorphic models on a 50 TeraFLOPS 336 node Playstation 3 cluster at the Air Force Research Laboratory. The five models examined span two classes of neuromorphic algorithms: hierarchical Bayesian and spiking neural networks. Our results indicate that the models scale well on this cluster and can emulate between 108 to 1010 neurons. In particular, our study indicates that a cluster of Playstation 3s can provide an economical, yet powerful, platform for simulating large scale neuromorphic models.