Intel 'pohoiki springs' could help fight coronavirus

Intel said Wednesday that it has completed "Pohoiki Springs, " the name of its 768 network of its Loihi neuromorphic "brain chips." The company will use Pohoiki Springs for machine learning applications, including a possible look at how the coronavirus is spread.

Intel Pohoiki Springs will use Loihi brain chips

The launch of Pohoiki Springs comes a little later than expected. Intel's roadmap it established last July requested that it be released to investigators later this year. Mike Davies, director of the Intel Neuromorphic Computing Laboratory, described that Pohoiki Springs has the computational intelligence of a mole rat, with the equivalent of 100 million neurons inside.

The cloud-based Pohoiki Springs system "will be made available to members of the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC), expanding their neuromorphic work to solve larger and more complex problems , " Intel said in a statement.

Intel thinks of Loihi the same way it treats Core CPUs: as a fundamental architecture that can be scaled and scaled down depending on the needs of the application. For example, a related device of two Loihi "Kapoho Bay" is used for edge detection, taking direct input from cameras and other sensors and interpreting that signal. For example, "Nahuku" combines 32 Loihi chips together.

Another function that Loihi could be used for, Davies said, would be to model what are known as “small world” statistical models. Small world models are of interest today because they model real-world social networks, where people interact and re-interact with others.

Visit our guide on the best processors on the market

Those models "could very well be used to model different scenarios of how the coronavirus could spread throughout the world based on how the links in those charts are cut, those connections or social interactions, and how to slow them down, " Davies said. real-world study of how "social distancing" actually works to slow the spread of the disease.

Such studies could be done by a more generic X86 chip like Intel's Core. But Loihi is designed to be much more efficient under these types of scenarios, consuming only 100 watts in a 5U server form factor. we will keep you informed.

Pcworld font