PREENS, a Parallel Research Excecution Environment for Neural Systems

PREENS — a Parallel Research Execution Environment for Neural Systems — is a distributed neurosimulator, targeted on networks of workstations and transputer systems. As current applications of neural networks often contain large amounts of data and as the neural networks involved in tasks such as vision are very large, high requirements on memory and computational resources are imposed on the target execution platforms. PREENS can be executed in a distributed environment, i.e. tools and neural network simulation programs can be running on any machine connectable via TCP/IP. Using this approach, larger tasks and more data can be examined using an efficient coarse grained parallelism. Furthermore, the design of PREENS allows for neural networks to be running on any high performance MIMD machine such as a transputer system. In this paper, the different features and design concepts of PREENS are discussed. These can also be used for other applications, like image processing.