
The Nengo Neural Simulator - indescions_2018
https://www.nengo.ai/
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phonebucket
Refreshing that they use an OpenCL backend instead of CUDA. Would love for
OpenCL to grow more to challenge CUDA’s dominance in scientific computing.

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pixelHD
True! The fact that you'd be able to use pretty much any GPU - even
integrated/AMD/NVidia would really help.

Speaking of which, doesn't the new Vulkan API include compute too?

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grovesNL
Yes, Vulkan includes compute capabilities. For example, here is a relevant
section about compute pipelines in the Vulkan specification:
[https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.0/html/vkspe...](https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.0/html/vkspec.html#pipelines-
compute)

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kirillseva
Nengo is a very exciting technology. Wonder if they are working with Intel to
make nendo models run on the announced spiking neural network processor

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aurelian15
Student from the lab that originally developed Nengo here.

Yes! As far as I know, the company that develops Nengo (ABR) [1] is working on
this with Intel [2]. Also see the presentation "Building applications with
next generation neuromorphic hardware" from the NICE 2018 workshop [2] (video
is available, password is on the top of the page).

[1] [https://appliedbrainresearch.com/](https://appliedbrainresearch.com/)

[2] [https://appliedbrainresearch.com/pressreleases/02-nice-
loihi...](https://appliedbrainresearch.com/pressreleases/02-nice-loihi/)

[3]
[http://niceworkshop.org/nice-2018-agenda/](http://niceworkshop.org/nice-2018-agenda/)

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Uberphallus
Are there any inner details in Loihi available?

I'm currently working on something I can't speak much about, but it involves
heterogeneous NN, different ICs for training and for operation. Operation is
that way simpler, and hence significantly faster and more paralleliable, as
removes useless logic and the complexity of the "too many clock domains" hell
on backpropagation networks.

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orbifold
There are two published articles about it one describing the hardware
architecture, the other describing the software architecture.

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BucketSort
How does this differ from something like TensorFlow? "Nengo is used to
implement networks for deep learning, vision.." is this true? Does this system
even support things like automatic symbolic differentiation? This seems more
like a neuro science research tool than a practical framework for building
neural networks.

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aurelian15
Student from the lab that originally developed Nengo here.

You're correct in the assumption that Nengo is ‒ among others ‒ a neuroscience
research tool; primarily, because it allows you to build networks of spiking
neurons. Apart from neuroscience you can also do things like mapping pre-
trained deep neural networks onto spiking neurons. These networks can then be
executed on neuromorphic hardware.

However, you can also run your simulations with "regular" rate-based neurons.
In this case, the interface that Nengo provides is significantly more low-
level than that of TensorFlow. Still, the main difference to TensorFlow is
that Nengo networks are dynamic, i.e. the network is not described in terms of
discrete time steps, but as a fully dynamical system (though a numerical
simulator will discretise time at some point). In conjunction with
neuromorphic hardware this allows things like real-time motor control with
(sub-)millisecond resolution.

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psandersen
That sounds pretty interesting, would you happen to know if these can be used
to simulate the worm connectome (OpenWorm?) linked up in a virtual
environment?

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Seanny123
Other student from the lab here.

You could, but it might not be particularly useful. They already have a really
good simulation environment and ways to connect it to virtual environments. It
would be useful if you wanted to extend the model with further neural
populations!

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psandersen
Awesome, thanks for the reply.

So if someone had a cockroach or ant connectome the Nengo simulator could, in
theory, be used to simulate a population of them connected to some virtual
environment?

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Seanny123
Yes, it could, but you'd first have to translate the connectome into spiking
neurons, which is a non-trivial task.

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internetman55
Nengo is neat, fun stuff if you are interested in neurons or whatever

