by nickoppen » Mon Oct 07, 2013 9:45 am
Hi CIB,
I don't think that taking on this project for the parallella is a pointless exercise. Firstly, the back propagation part of the process may not have an elegant, scalable solution on this architecture but that does not mean that you won't get speed improvements. Secondly, those speed improvements (and the bottleneck penalties) are not yet quantified and, being neither a hardware guru or mathematician, I can't predict what they'll be. The only way I have is to suck it and see. Also, in getting to know the capabilities better a better solution may become evident.
As regards to why do it on the parallella when it cannot be adapted - there is no "standard" architecture and so whether you write it for the epiphany, Phi or cell, there will always be idiosyncrasies due to the processor architecture. I'm happy to write it for the parallella because I can buy it for $99. The Phi costs around $1500 and the cell is dead.
All that aside, I think that the parallella is cool and a feed forward, back propagation neural network is the only algorithm that I know that would seem to benefit from being written for it, so that's the one I'm doing.
nick
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