Si elegans Computational Modelling of C. elegans Nematode Nervous System using FPGAs

摘要

It has long been the goal of computational neuroscientists to understand and harness the parallel computational power of the mammalian nervous system. However, the vast complexity of such a nervous system has made it very difficult to fully understand even the most basic of functions such as movement and learning and accordingly there has been increasing attention paid to the development of emulations of simpler systems. One such system is the C. elegans nematode, which has been widely studied in recent years and there now exists a vast wealth of biological knowledge about its nervous structure, function and connectivity. The Si elegans EU FP7 project aims to develop a Hardware Neural Network (HNN) to accurately replicate the C. elegans nervous system behaviour to enable neuroscientists to better understand these basic functions. To fully replicate the C. elegans biological system requires powerful computing technologies, based on parallel processing, for real-time computation and therefore will use Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to achieve this. In this paper an overview of the complete hardware system required to fully realise Si elegans is presented along with an early small scale implementation of the hardware system.