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Counting bits

Hello,

I am a Python programmer writing neural network code with binary firing and binary weight values. My code will take many days to parse my large data sets. I have no idea how much fpga could help, what the cost would be, and how easy it would be to access it from Python. The problem is similar to competitive networks, where I must dot product many million-length bit vectors (which only change occasionally) with 1 input vector. Anybody want to estimate the cost, speedup, and value an fpga could offer me?

Seems like this problem shouldn't be so hard, but from the little research I've done I haven't found a good value product that is ready-made, so I'm looking at (multiple?) fpga as a coprocessor.

Reply to
andrewfelch
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Dini has a new PCIe x8 board. It should work really well for your needs but nobody has built the DMA engine and drivers for it yet so that adds to its $10k cost. FPGAs are great for accelerating neural network projects. There are lots of papers with algorithms for it in ACM and IEEE journals. The Python interface is not a problem. It will come to IOCTLs at some point. You may have to make a C API and DLL wrapper if your Python cannot make IOCTL calls directly.

Here's my usual plug: I just wish there were a hardware vendor who would put some cheap FPGAs (Spartan 3e 1600s) on a cheap board with some standard DRAM and SRAM slots (unpopulated) and a PCIe x8 (or x4) slot and then sell the board for < $300. Design the darn thing for acceleration, not prototyping. They could make a killing on a well-made board with 8 or 16 fast DMA channels and a driver that worked for that really well.

Reply to
Brannon

So how many million-length bit-vector dot products might I be able to do per second? My 3.8ghz P4 can do 125/sec. I would prefer building a beowulf cluster if the price:performance was similar (because fpga is so foreign to me). Of course if you tell me 10,000/sec I will become an instant fpga evangelist, hehe.

Jan: I use a matrix library written in C.

Thanks for your help guys, AndrewF

Reply to
andrewfelch

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