Communication Sparsity in Distributed Spiking Neural Network Simulations to Improve Scalability

Hierarchical Network Connectivity and Partitioning for Reconfigurable Large-Scale Neuromorphic Systems

We present an efficient and scalable partitioning method for mapping large-scale neural network models with locally dense and globally sparse connectivity onto reconfigurable neuromorphic hardware. Scalability in computational efficiency, i.e., amount of time spent in actual computation, remains a huge challenge in very large networks. Most partitioning algorithms also struggle to address the scalability in network workloads in finding a globally optimal partition and efficiently mapping onto hardware. As communication is regarded as the most energy and time-consuming part of such distributed processing, the partitioning framework is optimized for compute-balanced, memory-efficient parallel processing targeting low-latency execution and dense synaptic storage, with minimal routing across various compute cores. We demonstrate highly scalable and efficient partitioning for connectivity-aware and hierarchical address-event routing resource-optimized mapping, significantly reducing the total communication volume recursively when compared to random balanced assignment. We showcase our results working on synthetic networks with varying degrees of sparsity factor and fan-out, small-world networks, feed-forward networks, and a hemibrain connectome reconstruction of the fruit-fly brain. The combination of our method and practical results suggest a promising path toward extending to very large-scale networks and scalable hardware-aware partitioning.