A parallel processor designed for artificial neural systems simulation
David M. Skapura · 7th Computers in Aerospace Conference · 1989
Artificial Systems (ANS) technology has shown great promise as a means of addressing some of the very complex pattern matching problems that have heretofore eluded solution by computer; examples of such problems include resource allocation for battle management, real-time target identification and classification, and other open-world problems. However, it is difficult to implement a realistic ANS solution to these problems due to the inherent differences between ANS architectures and the computers used to simulate them. Eventually, this problem will be solved by the development of integrated circuits designed specifically for ANS applications. In the interim, researchers and applications developers are faced with having to use software techniques on uniprocessor systems to simulate the parallelism of an ANS model. This approach allows development of proof-of-concept applications for the technology, but generally precludes the integration of ANS processing techniques into operational systems. To alleviate this situation, a parallel processing computer system with an architecture specifically tailored to ANS processing requirements has been designed and implemented at Ford Aerospace. This machine, dubbed the Neural Emulation Tool (NET), is based on an extensible array processor design that allows the user to add computer and/or memory capacity to the system in a modular fashion. The parallelism provided by this architecture, coupled with the ANS simulation software developed for NET, provides the computer resources needed to implement large scale ANS simulations in laboratory or operational applications. This paper describes the problems associated with simulating an ANS on traditional computing platforms, including many parallel processing systems, and shows how the architecture of the NET computer addresses these issues to provide fast and flexible ANS simulations in a small computer system.