Is there a maximum number of cores for Neural Net?

jerry_cooper

Hi all,

I have a customer wondering how many cores JMP can/will use at one time. They are looking to beef up their computers for when they run large neural net models. They know their computers are processor limited as opposed to memory limited, so they are wondering how many processors to throw at it. Any input would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Jerry

Bill_Worley

Hi Jerry,

I had a quad core in a previous life and when running neural nets I want to say 6 out of the 8 processors were being used to a larger degree.  I just ran a fit with my current machine and all 4 cores were cranking at about 78%.  Just a side note the RAM did not move off of about 4 Gb.

It is not so much the number of hidden nodes that will slow things down, but more the size of the data set, the amount of boosting and the number of tours that will increase the time to complete the model fit.  Even on a larger desktop with 8 cores and 32 Gb RAM we would set up a NN at the end of the day and then go home.  Mind you we were looking at hundreds of thousands to millions of rows in the data tables.  Some took days to finish... if we could wait that long.

Best,

Bill