Sandia National Labs has flipped the switch on its SpiNNaker 2 “brain-inspired” supercomputer that eschews both GPUs and internal storage. The system, supplied by Germany-based SpiNNcloud, will rank amongst the top five “brain inspired” platforms, mimicking between 150 and 180 million neurons. Each of the 48 chips packs 20 MB of SRAM, with each board carrying 96 GB of external LPDDR4 external memory. So, with 90 boards, that amounts to 8640 GB of DRAM, while a 1440 board system carries 69,120 chips and 138240 TB of DRAM. At Sandia, according to SpiNNcloud, “The Supercomputer is hooked in to existing HPC systems and does not contain any OS or disks.