Mapping Large-Scale Spiking Neural Network on Arbitrary Meshed Neuromorphic Hardware

Neuromorphic hardware systems—designed as 2D-mesh structures with parallel neurosynaptic cores—have proven highly efficient at executing large-scale spiking neural networks (SNNs). A critical challenge, however, lies in mapping neurons efficiently to these cores. While existing approaches work well with regular, fully functional mesh structures, they falter in real-world scenarios where hardware has irregular shapes or non-functional cores caused by defects or resource fragmentation. To address these limitations, we propose a novel mapping method based on an innovative space-filling curve: the Adaptive Locality-Preserving (ALP) curve. Using a unique divide-and-conquer construction algorithm, the ALP curve ensures adaptability to meshes of any shape while maintaining crucial locality properties—essential for efficient mapping. Our method demonstrates exceptional computational efficiency, making it ideal for large-scale deployments. These distinctive characteristics enable our approach to handle complex scenarios that challenge conventional methods. Experimental results show that our method matches state-of-the-art solutions in regular-shape mapping while achieving significant improvements in irregular scenarios, reducing communication overhead by up to 57.1%.