Among the many possible approaches for the parallelization of self-organizing
networks, and in particular of growing self-organizing networks, perhaps the
most common one is producing an optimized, parallel implementation of the
standard sequential algorithms reported in the literature. In this paper we
explore an alternative approach, based on a new algorithm variant specifically
designed to match the features of the large-scale, fine-grained parallelism of
GPUs, in which multiple input signals are processed at once. Comparative tests
have been performed, using both parallel and sequential implementations of the
new algorithm variant, in particular for a growing self-organizing network that
reconstructs surfaces from point clouds. The experimental results show that
this approach allows harnessing in a more effective way the intrinsic
parallelism that the self-organizing networks algorithms seem intuitively to
suggest, obtaining better performances even with networks of smaller size.Comment: 17 page
