The Parallel Problems Server: an Interactive Tool for Large Scale Machine Learning

Imagine that you wish to classify data consisting of tens of thousands of ex(cid:173) amples residing in a twenty thousand dimensional space. We describe the Parallel Prob(cid:173) lems Server (PPServer) and MATLAB*P. In tandem they allow users of networked computers to work transparently on large data sets from within Matlab. This work is motivated by the desire to bring the many benefits of scientific computing algorithms and computational power to machine learning researchers. We demonstrate the usefulness of the system on a number of tasks.