a large-scale evolutionary hardware
research platform

Starlab, a multidisciplinary advanced research institute now based in Barcelona, Spain, focuses on advanced scientific research projects with significant long-term potential impact for humanity.

My research group was tasked with designing and evolving artifical neural networks directly in silico, combining evolvable hardware and genetic algorithms in a novel approach towards the design and implementation of large-scale neural networks.

Our custom hardware could simultaneously update 131 Billion cells per second.

Computational Power
~ 10,000 Pentium III PCs

Cellular Automata Update Rate
131 billion cells / second

Number of Supported Neurons
74.5 million

Number of Supported Cells
893 million

Number of neurons per neural module
1152

Number of Supported Neural Modules
64,640

Neural Module Chromosome Length
91,000 bits

Number of FPGAs
72 Xilinx XC-6264BG560

Number of FPGA Reconfigurable Function Units
1,179,648

Phenotype / Genotype Memory
1.18 Gbytes

Power Consumption
1.5 KWatt [ 5V, 300A ]