Spaun

Spaun is currently the world’s largest functional brain model. It is the main focus of Chapter 7 of How to Build a Brain by Chris Eliasmith. Spaun first appeared in Science; these documents also serve as a home to supporting material for the original paper.

The Spaun model consists of about 2.5 million spiking neurons. It has a single eye and an arm. All input is raw images shown to the eye, and all output is arm movements, controlled directly by the brain.

Spaun performing several tasks

This project contains the Spaun [1] model, updated for Nengo 2.0.

[1]	Chris Eliasmith, Terrence C. Stewart, Xuan Choo, Trevor Bekolay, Travis DeWolf, Yichuan Tang, and Daniel Rasmussen. A large-scale model of the functioning brain. Science, 338:1202-1205, 2012. doi:10.1126/science.1225266.

Running with Nengo OCL

If you want to run with nengo_ocl:

python run_spaun.py -d 512 --ocl --ocl_platform=1 --ocl_device=3

where:

• the -d flag sets the dimensionality of Spaun,
• the --ocl flag tells the run script to use nengo_ocl
• the –ocl_platform flag tells it what OCL platform to use
• the –ocl_device flag tells it what ocl device to use on said platform (this flag is optional, it’s used in the context creation for pyopencl)

To determine the ocl_platform and ocl_device of the device you want to use, see pyopencl.create_some_context().

To enable OCL profiling, find where the nengo_ocl.Simulator is created in run_spaun.py, and uncomment the version that has provifiling enabled. Also uncomment the line to print profiling.

Resources

• Videos
  • Introduction
  • Tasks
• Popular press