Thomas E. Potok

Shuaiwen Leon Song, Bonnie Kruft, Minjia Zhang et al. · microsoft-research

In the upcoming decade, deep learning may revolutionize the natural sciences, enhancing our capacity to model and predict natural occurrences. This could herald a new era of scientific exploration, bringing significant advancements across sectors from drug development to renewable energy. To answer this call, we present DeepSpeed4Science initiative (deepspeed4science.ai) which aims to build unique capabilities through AI system technology innovations to help domain experts to unlock today's biggest science mysteries. By leveraging DeepSpeed's current technology pillars (training, inference and compression) as base technology enablers, DeepSpeed4Science will create a new set of AI system technologies tailored for accelerating scientific discoveries by addressing their unique complexity beyond the common technical approaches used for accelerating generic large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we showcase the early progress we made with DeepSpeed4Science in addressing two of the critical system challenges in structural biology research.

Hamed Poursiami, Shay Snyder, Guojing Cong et al.

Graph classification is a fundamental task in domains ranging from molecular property prediction to materials design. While graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve strong performance by learning expressive representations via message passing, they incur high computational costs, limiting their scalability and deployment on resource-constrained devices. Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC), also known as Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSA), offers a lightweight, brain-inspired alternative, yet existing HDC-based graph methods typically struggle to match the predictive performance of GNNs. In this work, we propose VS-Graph, a vector-symbolic graph learning framework that narrows the gap between the efficiency of HDC and the expressive power of message passing. VS-Graph introduces a Spike Diffusion mechanism for topology-driven node identification and an Associative Message Passing scheme for multi-hop neighborhood aggregation entirely within the high-dimensional vector space. Without gradient-based optimization or backpropagation, our method achieves competitive accuracy with modern GNNs, outperforming the prior HDC baseline by 4-5% on standard benchmarks such as MUTAG and DD. It also matches or exceeds the performance of the GNN baselines on several datasets while accelerating the training by a factor of up to 450x. Furthermore, VS-Graph maintains high accuracy even with the hypervector dimensionality reduced to D=128, demonstrating robustness under aggressive dimension compression and paving the way for ultra-efficient execution on edge and neuromorphic hardware.

Ashish Gautam, Prasanna Date, Shruti Kulkarni et al.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are computational models inspired by the structure and dynamics of biological neuronal networks. Their event-driven nature enables them to achieve high energy efficiency, particularly when deployed on neuromorphic hardware platforms. Unlike conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), which primarily rely on layered architectures, SNNs naturally support a wide range of connectivity patterns, from traditional layered structures to small-world graphs characterized by locally dense and globally sparse connections. In this work, we introduce NeuroCoreX, an FPGA-based emulator designed for the flexible co-design and testing of SNNs. NeuroCoreX supports all-to-all connectivity, providing the capability to implement diverse network topologies without architectural restrictions. It features a biologically motivated local learning mechanism based on Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP). The neuron model implemented within NeuroCoreX is the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) model, with current-based synapses facilitating spike integration and transmission . A Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter (UART) interface is provided for programming and configuring the network parameters, including neuron, synapse, and learning rule settings. Users interact with the emulator through a simple Python-based interface, streamlining SNN deployment from model design to hardware execution. NeuroCoreX is released as an open-source framework, aiming to accelerate research and development in energy-efficient, biologically inspired computing.

Prasanna Date, Catherine Schuman, Bill Kay et al.

Neuromorphic computing is a non-von Neumann computing paradigm that performs computation by emulating the human brain. Neuromorphic systems are extremely energy-efficient and known to consume thousands of times less power than CPUs and GPUs. They have the potential to drive critical use cases such as autonomous vehicles, edge computing and internet of things in the future. For this reason, they are sought to be an indispensable part of the future computing landscape. Neuromorphic systems are mainly used for spike-based machine learning applications, although there are some non-machine learning applications in graph theory, differential equations, and spike-based simulations. These applications suggest that neuromorphic computing might be capable of general-purpose computing. However, general-purpose computability of neuromorphic computing has not been established yet. In this work, we prove that neuromorphic computing is Turing-complete and therefore capable of general-purpose computing. Specifically, we present a model of neuromorphic computing, with just two neuron parameters (threshold and leak), and two synaptic parameters (weight and delay). We devise neuromorphic circuits for computing all the μ-recursive functions (i.e., constant, successor and projection functions) and all the μ-recursive operators (i.e., composition, primitive recursion and minimization operators). Given that the μ-recursive functions and operators are precisely the ones that can be computed using a Turing machine, this work establishes the Turing-completeness of neuromorphic computing.

Prasanna Date, Thomas Potok

A major challenge in machine learning is the computational expense of training these models. Model training can be viewed as a form of optimization used to fit a machine learning model to a set of data, which can take up significant amount of time on classical computers. Adiabatic quantum computers have been shown to excel at solving optimization problems, and therefore, we believe, present a promising alternative to improve machine learning training times. In this paper, we present an adiabatic quantum computing approach for training a linear regression model. In order to do this, we formulate the regression problem as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem. We analyze our quantum approach theoretically, test it on the D-Wave 2000Q adiabatic quantum computer and compare its performance to a classical approach that uses the Scikit-learn library in Python. Our analysis shows that the quantum approach attains up to 2.8x speedup over the classical approach on larger datasets, and performs at par with the classical approach on the regression error metric.

Maryam Parsa, Catherine D. Schuman, Prasanna Date et al.

Training neural networks for neuromorphic deployment is non-trivial. There have been a variety of approaches proposed to adapt back-propagation or back-propagation-like algorithms appropriate for training. Considering that these networks often have very different performance characteristics than traditional neural networks, it is often unclear how to set either the network topology or the hyperparameters to achieve optimal performance. In this work, we introduce a Bayesian approach for optimizing the hyperparameters of an algorithm for training binary communication networks that can be deployed to neuromorphic hardware. We show that by optimizing the hyperparameters on this algorithm for each dataset, we can achieve improvements in accuracy over the previous state-of-the-art for this algorithm on each dataset (by up to 15 percent). This jump in performance continues to emphasize the potential when converting traditional neural networks to binary communication applicable to neuromorphic hardware.

Robert M. Patton, J. Travis Johnston, Steven R. Young et al.

Deep learning, through the use of neural networks, has demonstrated remarkable ability to automate many routine tasks when presented with sufficient data for training. The neural network architecture (e.g. number of layers, types of layers, connections between layers, etc.) plays a critical role in determining what, if anything, the neural network is able to learn from the training data. The trend for neural network architectures, especially those trained on ImageNet, has been to grow ever deeper and more complex. The result has been ever increasing accuracy on benchmark datasets with the cost of increased computational demands. In this paper we demonstrate that neural network architectures can be automatically generated, tailored for a specific application, with dual objectives: accuracy of prediction and speed of prediction. Using MENNDL--an HPC-enabled software stack for neural architecture search--we generate a neural network with comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art networks on a cancer pathology dataset that is also $16\times$ faster at inference. The speedup in inference is necessary because of the volume and velocity of cancer pathology data; specifically, the previous state-of-the-art networks are too slow for individual researchers without access to HPC systems to keep pace with the rate of data generation. Our new model enables researchers with modest computational resources to analyze newly generated data faster than it is collected.

Linghao Song, Fan Chen, Steven R. Young et al.

We present a deep learning approach for vertex reconstruction of neutrino-nucleus interaction events, a problem in the domain of high energy physics. In this approach, we combine both energy and timing data that are collected in the MINERvA detector to perform classification and regression tasks. We show that the resulting network achieves higher accuracy than previous results while requiring a smaller model size and less training time. In particular, the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art by 4.00% on classification accuracy. For the regression task, our model achieves 0.9919 on the coefficient of determination, higher than the previous work (0.96).

Catherine D. Schuman, Thomas E. Potok, Robert M. Patton et al.

Neuromorphic computing has come to refer to a variety of brain-inspired computers, devices, and models that contrast the pervasive von Neumann computer architecture. This biologically inspired approach has created highly connected synthetic neurons and synapses that can be used to model neuroscience theories as well as solve challenging machine learning problems. The promise of the technology is to create a brain-like ability to learn and adapt, but the technical challenges are significant, starting with an accurate neuroscience model of how the brain works, to finding materials and engineering breakthroughs to build devices to support these models, to creating a programming framework so the systems can learn, to creating applications with brain-like capabilities. In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey of the research and motivations for neuromorphic computing over its history. We begin with a 35-year review of the motivations and drivers of neuromorphic computing, then look at the major research areas of the field, which we define as neuro-inspired models, algorithms and learning approaches, hardware and devices, supporting systems, and finally applications. We conclude with a broad discussion on the major research topics that need to be addressed in the coming years to see the promise of neuromorphic computing fulfilled. The goals of this work are to provide an exhaustive review of the research conducted in neuromorphic computing since the inception of the term, and to motivate further work by illuminating gaps in the field where new research is needed.

Thomas E. Potok, Catherine Schuman, Steven R. Young et al.

Current Deep Learning approaches have been very successful using convolutional neural networks (CNN) trained on large graphical processing units (GPU)-based computers. Three limitations of this approach are: 1) they are based on a simple layered network topology, i.e., highly connected layers, without intra-layer connections; 2) the networks are manually configured to achieve optimal results, and 3) the implementation of neuron model is expensive in both cost and power. In this paper, we evaluate deep learning models using three different computing architectures to address these problems: quantum computing to train complex topologies, high performance computing (HPC) to automatically determine network topology, and neuromorphic computing for a low-power hardware implementation. We use the MNIST dataset for our experiment, due to input size limitations of current quantum computers. Our results show the feasibility of using the three architectures in tandem to address the above deep learning limitations. We show a quantum computer can find high quality values of intra-layer connections weights, in a tractable time as the complexity of the network increases; a high performance computer can find optimal layer-based topologies; and a neuromorphic computer can represent the complex topology and weights derived from the other architectures in low power memristive hardware.