Eugen,
Thanks for the interesting post.
I am left wondering whether the Cell Broadband Engine could
potentially be effective for Genetic Programming learning. (In
Novamente we use an evolutionary learning algorithm different from GP,
but it's similar enough that if the CBE can do GP, then it can do our
algorithm as well.)
I am curious for the opinion of others who are more knowledgeable
about such things. (I'm not really a hardware guy.)
Looking over the article you referenced, it seems to me that the PPE
(the main processing unit, a PowerPC variant) could be used to run the
main GP algorithm, and then fitness evaluations could be carried out
on the 8 SPE's ("synergistic
processing units") in parallel.
For Novamente-relevant cases (as opposed to mathematical optimization
problems) this would require what the above article calls a "Large
single-SPE programming model", meaning that the SPE would need to
access main memory to do its fitness evaluation. (Because for
Novamente learning, fitness evaluation of evolved programs has to do
with comparison of programs against fairly large databases of
experientially and inferentially acquired knowledge.)
A downside is that the Cell has only 256MB of RAM. This doesn't seem
to be a fundamental obstacle but it means care would have to be taken
in coding/design.... In the application I envision, most of the RAM
would be taken up by the set of data against which the candidate
programs are compared during the fitness evaluation process.
Of course, the basic idea is that if this worked it would be much
cheaper to buy PS3's than 8-processor PC's, so a much larger
evolutionary learning farm could be constructed at a relatively modest
budget.
Thoughts?
--- Ben Goertzel
On 11/27/05, Eugen Leitl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/26/228247
> Posted by: ScuttleMonkey, on 2005-11-27 06:34:00
>
> An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks is running a paper from
> the MPR Fall Processor Forum 2005 explores [1]programming models for
> the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) Processor, from the simple to the
> progressively more advanced. With nine cores on a single die,
> programming for the CBE is like programming for no processor you've
> ever met before."
>
> References
>
> 1.
> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-fpfunleashing/?ca=dgr-lnxw01CellUnleash
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
> --
> Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a>
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