The Operating System of the Neuromorphic BrainScaleS-1 System
This work addresses the problem of usability and flexibility for researchers in computational neuroscience and beyond-von-Neumann computing, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing neuromorphic hardware.
The paper tackles the challenge of making the BrainScaleS-1 neuromorphic system accessible by developing an operating system that allows users to emulate networks using PyNN with minimal expertise, while also enabling expert-level customization. It presents the software stack and methodologies for operating and developing on this platform.
BrainScaleS-1 is a wafer-scale mixed-signal accelerated neuromorphic system targeted for research in the fields of computational neuroscience and beyond-von-Neumann computing. The BrainScaleS Operating System (BrainScaleS OS) is a software stack giving users the possibility to emulate networks described in the high-level network description language PyNN with minimal knowledge of the system. At the same time, expert usage is facilitated by allowing to hook into the system at any depth of the stack. We present operation and development methodologies implemented for the BrainScaleS-1 neuromorphic architecture and walk through the individual components of BrainScaleS OS constituting the software stack for BrainScaleS-1 platform operation.