Road to scalability for efficient graph search on massively parallel neuromorphic hardware

Oskar von Seeler, Elena C. Offenberg, Carlo Michaelis, Tomas Kulvicius, Jannik Luboeinski, Andrew B. Lehr, Christian Tetzlaff

Efficient computation of shortest paths in weighted graphs is a fundamental problem with many applications. Neuromorphic hardware platforms promise massively parallel, efficient computation, changing parallelism tradeoffs. In this work, we introduce NEURO-MAPP (Neuromorphic-based Min-Add Parallel Propagation), a distributed shortest path algorithm designed to use the local computation and network communication available in neuromorphic systems. We provide an optimized implementation of the algorithm on the SpiNNaker 2 platform and evaluate its performance on a selection of synthetic and real-world graphs. These results are compared to Dijkstra's algorithm on a modern CPU. We find that the NEURO-MAPP implementation scales favorably in terms of runtime for many graph types while consuming less energy per shortest-path query than the CPU implementation in almost all cases. These findings highlight the potential of neuromorphic hardware featuring sparse, spike-based communication as a scalable and energy-efficient platform for computation in graph search and related tasks.