DANNA: A neuromorphic software ecosystem

Architectures for neuromorphic computing have evolved to the point where a significant amount of software design and implementation is necessary for leveraging these architectures to solve real problems. In this paper, we describe the software ecosystem for the DANNA neuromorphic computing model. This ecosystem is composed of four pieces: a simulator, commander, evolutionary optimizer, and visualizer. The ecosystem facilitates developing applications for DANNA, and in turn will help DANNA evolve into a more effective neuromorphic computing model. We describe how we use the software components to perform digit classification using the MNIST dataset. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.