Simulation of associative neural networks

The human brain is far superior to a modern computer in its ability to do associative recall. Many theorists believe that one of the important functions of primate neocortex is "associative memory". Palm\´s network (Palm et al., 1997) is one of the most powerful associative memory models available. To study variations of this basic model, we have built a multiprocessor based Palm simulator that executes on our Beowulf cluster and supercomputers at NASA. We have also created a spiking version that adds temporal information to the model and is more biologically plausible. Experimental results are summarized, and the problems solved are also discussed.