A Brain-Like Supercomputer Mimicking Macaque Brain

Chinese researchers recently revealed a groundbreaking new supercomputer, the "Darwin Monkey," also known as "Wukong." This innovative system represents a significant advancement in brain-like computing, utilizing dedicated neuromorphic chips to mimic the structure and function of a macaque monkey's brain.

The Darwin Monkey boasts an impressive scale, supporting over 2 billion spiking neurons and more than 100 billion synapses. This neuron count closely mirrors that of a macaque brain. The system consumes approximately 2,000 watts of power during typical operation. Developed by the State Key Laboratory of Brain-Machine Intelligence at Zhejiang University, the Darwin Monkey is a significant leap forward in the field.

The core of the Darwin Monkey is its 960 Darwin 3 neuromorphic computing chips, the third generation of brain-like neural processing units. These chips, developed in early 2023, are integrated into 15 blade-style neuromorphic servers. Each chip is capable of supporting over 2.35 million spiking neurons and hundreds of millions of synapses. The chips also incorporate a specialized instruction set for brain-inspired computing and an online neuromorphic learning mechanism.

The research team also developed a new-generation brain-inspired operating system to complement the neuromorphic computing chips. The system has been successfully used to run intelligent applications, including the DeepSeek brain-like large model, which can perform tasks such as logical reasoning, content generation, and mathematical problem-solving. The system can simulate animal brains of varying neuron sizes, including those of elegans, zebrafish, mice, and macaques.

The Darwin Monkey offers a new computational paradigm for existing computing scenarios. It can serve as a foundation for the development of artificial intelligence (AI), act as a brain simulation tool for neuroscientists, and provide new experimental methods to explore the brain's working mechanisms. By mimicking the brain's working mechanisms while achieving computational speeds beyond those of the human brain, the Wukong computer will provide powerful support for future research in brain-inspired AI.