Connections Per Second

[Thomas Edwards]

I have been wondering about interconnections per second ratings.
Suppose:

 A 128 input units, 64 hidden units, 128 output units 3-layer backprop
 network (learning the encoder problem, say).

 Let's say I can do 50 epochs of 128 exemplars in 41.54 seconds of this
 network.  Is it valid to say:

 Number of connections per exemplar = 
        (128 * 64) + (128 * 64) [forward prop] +
        (128 * 64) [back prop] = 24576

 Number of connections per epoch = 24576 * 128 = 3145728

 Number of connections per 50 epochs = 3145728 * 50 = 157286400

 Divide by run time for 50 epochs = 157286400/41.54 = 3786384.2

 Now, is it accurate to say my backprop program runs at 3.7 million
 interconnections per second?

 Is my claim still acceptable if I am actually performing the 
 neural network calculations by systollic array matrix multiplication?

 I'll be the first to admit that interconnections per second is a 
 speed measure which does not neccessarily reflect the reality of
 the neural processing system it is measured on, but I've just been
 reading some Cray claims that the X-MP (1 CPU) should be able to do
 50 million interconnections per second, and the Connection Machine
 is capable of only 13 million (which seems fairly slow compared to
 some of the benchmarks I have run).

-Thomas Edwards
 ins_atge at jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu
 tedwards at cmsun.nrl.navy.mil
 ins_atge at jhuvms.BITNET