Neuromorphic Nearest-Neighbor Search Using Intel's Pohoiki Springs

Understand

Neuromorphic computing applies insights from neuroscience to uncover innovations in computing technology.

• In the brain, billions of interconnected neurons perform rapid computations at extremely low energy levels by leveraging properties that are foreign to conventional computing systems, such as temporal spiking codes and finely parallelized processing units integrating both memory and computation.
• Here, we showcase the Pohoiki Springs neuromorphic system, a mesh of 768 interconnected Loihi chips that collectively implement 100 million spiking neurons in silicon.
• We demonstrate a scalable approximate k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) algorithm for searching large databases that exploits neuromorphic principles.