Towards Biophysically-Based Neuromorphic Computing at Scale: Markov Abstractions of Electrochemical Reaction-Diffusion in Synaptic Transmission

Progress in computational neuroscience towards understanding brain function is challenged both by the complexity of molecular-scale electrochemical interactions at the level of individual neurons and synapses, and the dimensionality of network dynamics across the brain covering a vast range of spatial and temporal scales. Our work abstracts the highly detailed, biophysically realistic 3D reaction-diffusion model of a chemical synapse to a compact internal state space representation that maps onto parallel neuromorphic hardware for efficient emulation on very large scale, and offers near-equivalence in input-output dynamics while preserving biologically interpretable tunable parameters.