Parallel Coarse Grain Computing of Boltzmann Machines

摘要

The resolution of combinatorial optimization problems can greatly benefit from the parallel and distributed processing which is characteristic of neural network paradigms. Nevertheless, the fine grain parallelism of the usual neural models cannot be implemented in an entirely efficient way either in general-purpose multicomputers or in networks of computers, which are nowadays the most common parallel computer architectures. Therefore, we present a parallel implementation of a modified Boltzmann machine where the neurons are distributed among the processors of the multicomputer, which asynchronously compute the evolution of their subset of neurons using values for the other neurons that might not be updated, thus reducing the communication requirements. Several alternatives to allow the processors to work cooperatively are analyzed and their performance detailed. Among the proposed schemes, we have identified one that allows the corresponding Boltzmann Machine to converge to solutions with high quality and which provides a high acceleration over the execution of the Boltzmann machine in uniprocessor computers.