Germany: World’s largest brain-like supercomputer to aid drug research

Germany’s SpiNNcloud has partnered with Leipzig University to deploy the world’s largest brain-inspired supercomputer specifically designed for drug discovery and personalized medicine research. The system, based on the second generation SpiNNaker hardware, comprises 4,320 chips and around 650,000 ARM-based cores, enabling the simulation of at least 10.5 billion neurons. This architecture allows for massively parallel processing of small, heterogeneous workloads, making it highly efficient for screening billions of molecules in silico—up to 20 billion molecules in under an hour, which is 100 times faster than traditional CPU clusters. The SpiNNcloud system’s design emphasizes energy efficiency and scalability, using 48 SpiNNaker2 chips per server board, each with 152 ARM cores and specialized accelerators. This results in performance that is 18 times more energy-efficient than current GPU-based systems, addressing power consumption and cooling challenges common in high-performance computing. The brain-inspired architecture supports dynamic sparsity and extreme parallelism, which