haroun@sunlite.concordia.ca (Dr. B. Haroun ) (04/03/91)
We are in the process of buying a hardware accelerator for NN
board from a company called "SAIC" (Scientific Application Int. Corp)
The Package includes
1-Delta-II FP processor (11M connections/sec and 2.7M cps for back
propagation). If you buy it with an IBM PC it is
called SAIC-II workstation.
2-ANS-kit Software tool kit to configure different types of nets
(13 types). Operating system, assembler, C compiler
ANSPEC high level NN language, etc..
3-Interface Interace board for interactin with A/D converters
and an Image frame grabber.
Depending on your options we are speaking of a cost in the range
of US$30-50K.
The application area we are looking at is a real time
Robotic manipulator control (also some related pattern recognition
problems).
My questions to the net land is:
a-Does any one have experience with the above hardware/software
environment?
b- Do you know of an equally powerful hardware software environment?
Any comments appreciated.(email to haroun@sunlite.concordia.ca).
Thanks
Baher Haroun
--
Baher Haroun
haroun@sunlite.concordia.caegel@neural.dynas.se (Peter Egelberg) (04/11/91)
In article <915@antares.Concordia.CA> haroun@sunlite.Concordia.CA (B. Haroun ) writes: > >We are in the process of buying a hardware accelerator for NN >board from a company called "SAIC" (Scientific Application Int. Corp) >The Package includes > 1-Delta-II FP processor (11M connections/sec and 2.7M cps for back > propagation). If you buy it with an IBM PC it is > called SAIC-II workstation. . . . > >My questions to the net land is: . . . >b- Do you know of an equally powerful hardware software environment? I'm using a Hauppuage 4860 PC motherboard. It has a 25Mhz i486 and a 25Mhz i860 on it. I bought the board, with 16 Mb, for $5000 six months ago. The i860 is capable of performing one addition and a multiplication, single-precision, in one clock cycle. This means that a 25Mhz i860 can perform 25M connections/sec. Some i860 addin-boards have the i860 running at 40Mhz. Unfortunately the above performance assumes that there is no memory latency and this is seldom the case. But my guess is that SAIC also assume this in there performance figures. I don't know the theoretical performance of the IBM RS/6000. But I did a floating point intensive benchmark on a RS/6000 with a 25Mhz CPU. The RS/6000 out performed my 25Mhz i860 by nearly a factor of two. The benchmark was written in C. So result is really only valid if plan to use C. -- Peter Egelberg E-mail: egel@neural.dynas.se Neural AB Phone: +46 46 11 00 90 Otto Lindbladsv. 5 Fax: +46 46 13 60 85 223 65 LUND, SWEDEN