Thesis on NN simlulation hardware availabe for ftp

[Mark James]

The following Master of Science thesis is available for ftp from neuroprose:


 Design of Low-cost, Real-time Simulation Systems for Large Neural Networks
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		             Mark James
		      The University of Sydney

                           January, 1992

			      ABSTRACT

Systems with large amounts of computing power and storage are 
required to simulate very large neural networks capable of tackling complex 
control problems and real-time emulation of the human sensory, language 
and reasoning systems. General-purpose parallel computers do not have 
communications, processor and memory architectures optimized for neural 
computation and so can not perform such simulations at reasonable cost. The 
thesis analyses several software and hardware strategies to make feasible the 
simulation of large, brain-like neural networks in real-time and presents a 
particular multicomputer design able to implement these strategies. An 
important design goal is that the system must not sacrifice computational 
flexibility for speed as new information about the workings of the brain and 
new artificial neural network architectures and learning algorithms are 
continually emerging.

The main contributions of the thesis are:

-    an analysis of the important features of biological neural networks 
that need to be simulated,

-    a review of hardware and software approaches to neural 
networks, and an evaluation of their abilities to simulate brain-like 
networks,

-    the development of techniques for efficient simulation of brain-
like neural networks, and

-    the description of a multicomputer that is able to simulate large, 
brain-like neural networks in real-time and at low cost.

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To obtain a copy via FTP
use the standard procedure:
% ftp cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu
anonymous
Password: anything
ftp> cd pub/neuroprose
ftp> binary
ftp> get james.nnsim.ps.Z
ftp> quit
% zcat james.nnsim.ps.Z | lpr
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Mark James                                   |  EMAIL : mrj at cs.su.oz.au  |
Basser Department of Computer Science, F09   |  PHONE : +61-2-692-4276   |
The University of Sydney NSW 2006 AUSTRALIA  |  FAX   : +61-2-692-3838   |