A preliminary investigation of a neocortex model implementation on the Cray XD1

In this paper we study the acceleration of a new class of cognitive processing applications based on the structure of the neocortex. Specifically we examine the speedup of a visual cortex model for image recognition. We propose techniques to accelerate the application on general purpose processors and on reconfigurable logic. We present implementations of our approach on a Cray XD1 and compare the performance potential of scaling the design utilizing reconfigurable logic based acceleration to a software only design. Our results indicate that acceleration using reconfigurable logic can provide a significant speedup over a software only implementation.