When you train your network, you'll want to be loading mini-batches into memory. I've found flat files just fine for data sets of about 50,000 to 300,000 sample

When you train your network, you'll want to be loading mini-batches into memory. I've found flat files just fine for data sets of about 50,000 to 300,000 samples. The model itself will just be a matrix and a vector for each layer. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about getting going/speeding things up, happy to help. They can be really slow or reasonably fast depending on the implementation.