Overview of the AURA Hardware (PRESENCE)

The choice of a binary neural network architecture allows very efficient implementations in hardware, and this is a major aspect of the AURA project. The first AURA hardware prototype was implemented on a VME platform and was completed in 1997.

This project has been funded by the EPSRC in collaboration with British Aerospace and The Post Office Research Group. It aims to develop hardware and software high performance pattern recognition system for use on text and structural databases.

A major part of the project is aimed at building the Cortex-1 neural associative parallel processor.

Staff on project: Anthony Moulds, Zygmunt Ulanowski, Aaron Turner, Michael Weeks

Past staff on project: Ken Lees, John Kennedy, Julian Young, Amine Bermak, Michael Freeman

• PRESENCE (PaRallEl StructurEd Neural Computing Engine) is a family of hardware designs which accelerate the core CMM computations needed in AURA applications. The original PRESENCE card incorporates several improvements over the first hardware prototype. A datasheet for the PRESENCE-1 Card is available.
• PRESENCE-2 is the current AURA hardware implementation. PRESENCE-2 is a unique PCI-based FPGA/DSP hardware platform for solving high performance embedded computing problems. Being fully programmable, it can be used for various applications
• PRESENCE-III is currently under development and promises greater performance, storage and flexibility.