The Nengo team is psyched to announce the release of NengoLoihi version 1.1.0.
What is NengoLoihi?
NengoLoihi is a backend for the Nengo neural simulator allowing standard spiking Nengo models to run on Intel’s new Loihi neuromorphic chip. NengoLoihi includes an emulator so that you can develop spiking neuron models for Loihi without having access to hardware.
How do I use it?
Once installed, NengoLoihi simulates Nengo networks. After defining your network, instead of simulating it with
nengo.Simulator(model)
do
nengo_loihi.Simulator(model)
and that’s it!
What’s new?
In this release, we added support for the latest NxSDK 1.0.0 release and adopted the Apache 2.0 license, making NengoLoihi an open source project. We welcome new issues and pull requests on Github! Note, however, that NengoLoihi requires other parts of the Nengo ecosystem that are not open source.
Feature wise, v1.1.0 adds the GreedyInterchip and PartitionInterchip allocators that should speed up larger networks by reducing the amount of inter-chip communication. GreedyInterchip is now the default allocator, so most models will not need to change to see these benefits.
We fleshed out our support convolutional neural networks by handling the"same" padding for nengo.Convolution and supporting the new ConvolutionTranspose transform.
We also fixed several bugs, including those that lead to memory leaks when creating multiple Simulator instances in the same script. See the full changelog for the complete list of changes.
How do I get it?
If you are using the emulator, then you can simply use pip.
pip install nengo-loihi
If you are setting up NengoLoihi to use Loihi hardware for the first time, see the NengoLoihi installation instructions.
Where can I learn more?
- NengoLoihi documentation
- Instructions for installing Nengo and NengoLoihi
- An introduction to Nengo
- General Nengo documentation
Where can I get help?
You’re already there! If you have any questions about NengoLoihi, please ask in the Loihi category. And if you run in to any bugs or have suggestions for new features, file an issue through Github.