An experimental evaluation of extreme learning machines on several hardware devices

As an important learning algorithm, extreme learning machine (ELM) is known for its excellent learning speed. With the expansion of ELM’s applications in the field of classification and regression, the need for its real-time performance is increasing. Although the use of hardware acceleration is an obvious solution, how to select the appropriate acceleration hardware for ELM-based applications is a topic worthy of further discussion. For this purpose, we designed and evaluated the optimized ELM algorithms on three kinds of state-of-the-art acceleration hardware, i.e., multi-core CPU, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), and Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) which are all suitable for matrix multiplication optimization. The experimental results showed that the speedup ratio of these optimized algorithms on acceleration hardware achieved 10–800. Therefore, we suggest that (1) use GPU to accelerate ELM algorithms for large dataset, and (2) use FPGA for small dataset because of its lower power, especially for some embedded applications. We also opened our source code.