DARPA Goals, Requirements, and History of the SyNAPSE Project

The DARPA Synapse project webpage provides detailed information about the SyNAPSE project – including goals, requirements and history. The IBM TrueNorth SyNAPSE chip that has gained so much attention is one outcome of this project. Link: http://www.artificialbrains.com/darpa-synapse-program. Those at Supercomputing 2009 saw an early report on the project via the Supercomputing submission “The Cat is Out of the Bag: Cortical Simulations with 10^9 Neurons, 10^13 Synapses” by Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, Steven K. Esser, Horst D. Simon, and Dharmendra S. Modha that won a Gordon Bell Award.

From left to right: Steven K. Esser, Horst D. Simon, Dharmendra S. Modha, Mateo Valero (Chair, Gordon Bell Prize Committee), Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan (linked from Dharmendra S Modha’s Cognitive Computing Blog)

Here is a 2011 early tour of the IBM Brain Lab.