Prototyping a Biologically Plausible Neuron Model on a Heterogeneous CPU-FPGA Board

Abstract

A heterogeneous hardware-software system implemented on an Avnet ZedBoard Zynq SoC platform, is proposed for the computation of an extended Hodgkin Huxley (eHH), biologically plausible neural model. SoC's ARM A9 is in charge of handling execution of a single neuron as defined in the eHH model, each with a O(N) computational complexity, while the computation of the gap-junctions interactions for each cell is offloaded on the SoC's FPGA, cutting its O(N²) complexity by exploiting parallel-computing hardware techniques. The proposed hw-sw solution allows for speed-ups of about 18 times visa-vis à vectorized software implementation on the SoC's cores, and is comparable to the speed of the same model optimized for a 64-bit Intel Quad Core i7, at 3.9GHz.