title: FPGA implementation of a stochastic neural network for monotonic pseudo-Boolean optimization.
abstract: In this paper a FPGA implementation of a novel neural stochastic model for solving constrained NP-hard problems is proposed and developed. The model exploits pseudo-Boolean functions both to express the constraints and to define the cost function, interpreted as energy of a neural network. A wide variety of NP-hard problems falls in the class of problems that can be solved by this model, particularly those having a quadratic pseudo-Boolean penalty function. The proposed hardware implementation provides high computation speed by exploiting parallelism, as the neuron update and the constraint violation check can be performed in parallel over the whole network. The neural system has been tested on random and benchmark graphs, showing good performance with respect to the same heuristic for the same problems. Furthermore, the computational speed of the FPGA implementation has been measured and compared to software implementation. The developed architecture featured dramatically faster computation, with respect to the software implementation, even adopting a low-cost FPGA chip.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Comelico 39/41, I-20135 Milano, Italy. grossi@dsi.unimi.it
authors.forename: Giuliano
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Grossi
authors.forename: Federico
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Pedersini
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003201:Computers; D008959:Models, Neurological; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology; D013269:Stochastic Processes