This blog isn't dead yet;)

Hi. A quick update. I finished my activation simulator a month or two ago. Surprisingly, the new approach (doing computations and communication in parallel) doesn't seem to be any faster than the old one (compute, then communicate) even on a cluster with slow TCP/IP interconnect, which is a bit disappointing. However, I also discovered that communication overheads in my simulator are significantly smaller than in Topographica, and I am sure that communication patterns in both cases are the same or very similar. This gives us some hope that we will be able to get good speed-ups with MPI on distributed systems. At the moment I'm very busy with my end of term work, so I'll probably resume my research in April and start full-time development in June. That's all I had to say.