This script uses Mixed National Institute of Standards and Technology(MNIST) database. MNIST is a large database of handwritten digits that is commonly used for training various image processing systems.
See more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MNIST_database
Neon is the API used to train a fully connected neural network(NN). See here for details of installation and running Neon on Linux: http://neon.nervanasys.com/docs/0.9.0/installation.html
The purpose of this NN is to recognize handwritten images.