Neural Network applications using Beowulf

[Eray Ozkural]

On Tuesday 12 November 2002 06:24, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> I actually think that there is room to do a whole lot of interesting
> research on this in the realm of Real Computer Science.
>
> Too bad I'm a physicist...;-)

Note that most artificial neural network applications don't fall in the realm 
of supercomputing since they would be best suited to hardware 
implementations, or more commonly, serial software.

We had discussed this with colleagues back at bilkent cs department and we 
could not find great research opportunities in this area. It is a little 
similar to stuff like parallel DFA/NFA systems. You first need an application 
to prove that there is need for problems of that magnitude (more than what a 
serial computer could solve!). What good is a supercomputer for an artificial 
neural network that is comprised of just 20 nodes?

If of course somebody showed an application that did demand the power of a 
supercomputer it would be very different, then we would get all of our 
combinatorial tools to partition the computational space and parallelize 
whatever algorithm there is :)

Neural networks being Turing-complete, I assume such a network would bear an 
arrangement radically different from the "multi-layer feed-forward" networks 
that EE people seem to be obsessed with. I have lost my interest in that area 
since they don't seem to demand parallel systems and they are not 
biologically plausible.

Regards,

-- 
Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo at cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo  Malfunction: http://mp3.com/ariza
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