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Neural Shell

Name

Neural Shell Version 3.5

Source

Thomas E.Little SPANN Laboratory Department of Electrical Engineering Ohio State University ftp quanta.eng.ohio-state.edu

Price

public domain

Target usage

Model

Network Architecture

NeuralShell is somewhat out of the scope of the overview. It is NOT a NN-Simulator by itself but serves as a shell to call application programms. Nevertheless maybe some people can use NeuralShell as a simulator without writing any line of code because there are some of the usual network programs contained as examples (see ``paradigms''). In gegneral the user has to write a configuration file describing all his application programs within a welldefined language. Using this file NeuralShell builds up a window environment offering several (pop up) menues to specify parameters for a special simulation run of one of the application programs (Default values are possible!). If the user starts the application a configuration file (if neccessary) and command lines are generated automatically and a control window appears on the screen showing status messages belonging to the special simulation. Program calls are not restricted to the local machine, remote machines (supercomputers for example) can as well be called via ftp. There are some restricted tools to visualize learning sets and simulation results (see Display) but these are not really satisfactory (I think).

Paradigms

Hopfield, Hamming, Back Propagation, Kohonen Feature Map, Adaptive Slow Back Propagation, Frequency Sensitive Competetive Learning (the last two a developed at the SPANN Lab.)

Limitations

Implementation

Display

status of current jobs, display of Sun raster files and numerical data files

User Interface

shell, GUI

Execution

interactive

Data Format

NeuralShell generates configuration files for application programms. It displays Sun raster files and numerical data files (files of consecutive numbers).

Evaluation

Performance

Depending on Application/Host

System Requirements

Hardware

SUN, Cray

Operating System

UNIX

Display

SUNTOOLS (Version 2.1), X-Windows (>= Release 4)

Language

Installation and Documentation

Installation

executable, makefile (not easy)

Sources available

yes

Implementation language

C

Documentation

manuals, examples

Support

??

User Groups

??