Besides the fann library, I will benchmark Jet's Neural Library [Heller, 2002] (hereafter
    known as jneural) and Lightweight Neural Network [van Rossum, 2003] (hereafter
    known as lwnn). I have made sure that all three libraries have been compiled
    with the same compiler and the same compile-options.
    I have downloaded several other ANN libraries, but most of them had some
    problem making them difficult to use. Either they where not libraries, but programs
    [Anguita, 1993], [Zell, 2003], they could not compile [Software, 2002], or the
    documentation was so inadequate that is was not possible to implement the features
    needed in the benchmark [Darrington, 2003].
    Even though I will only benchmark two libraries besides the fann library, I still
    think that they give a good coverage of the different libraries which are available. I
    will now briefly discuss the pros and cons of these two libraries.

Yeah, so the author picked two simple, "easy to use" NN libraries to benchmark against, had trouble with others and just dropped them and then claimed it's fast because it performed "up to" 140 times faster than one of those two libraries. Seems kinda like a "get a paper out" work that is technically correct but doesn't measure up to real world standards. Real implementations would use vectorized math, math libraries with hand-optimized assembly or run straight on the GPU.