Accelerate your deep learning project deployments with Radeon Instinct™ powered solutions

Deep learning adoption is lagging as companies struggle with how to make it work. Now a new ecosystem is rising to deliver the integrated pieces that ultimately will be part of one turnkey system for deep learning.

Automation has proved its worth in meeting IT and business objectives. Even so, efficiencies in automation and work augmentation software can be greatly enhanced with deep learning. Yet deep learning adoption rates are low. That’s in part because the tech is difficult, and the talent pool is thin. The good news is that an ecosystem is forming and already beginning to resolve some of these issues as it continues to grow towards becoming a single turnkey system.

Why it takes an ecosystem

A Deloitte report found that fewer than 10% of the companies surveyed across 17 countries invested in machine learning. The chief reasons for the adoption gap is a lack of understanding on how to use the technology, an insufficient amount of data to train it with, and a shortage of talent who could make it all work. Translated in the simplest of terms, deep learning is perceived by some to be too hard to deploy for practical use.

The solution for that dilemma is what it has always been for any new technology requiring esoteric skill sets and faced with a talent shortage – build an easy-to-use, turnkey system. That is, of course, easier said than done.

“The ongoing digital revolution, which has been reducing frictional, transactional costs for years, has accelerated recently with tremendous increases in electronic data, the ubiquity of mobile interfaces, and the growing power of artificial intelligence (AI),” according to a McKinsey & Company report.

“Together, these forces are reshaping customer expectations and creating the potential for virtually every sector with a distribution component to have its borders redrawn or redefined, at a more rapid pace than we have previously experienced.”

That’s why today’s sophisticated and complex systems are commonly constructed not by a single vendor but by a strong and diverse ecosystem capable of delivering the many moving parts needed to make a single turnkey system. Especially when said systems must be equally workable for companies across industries and with diverse needs.

As a result, ecosystems are growing at breathtaking speeds. McKinsey & Company analysts predict that new ecosystems are likely to entirely replace many traditional industries by 2025.

Such an ecosystem is forming for machine learning. It’s seeded with four recently launched, ready-to-deploy solutions. They center on AMD’s Radeon Instinct training accelerator for machine learning, and its ROCm Open eCosystem (ROCm), an open source HPC/Hyperscale-class platform for GPU computing. AMD takes open source all the way down to the graphics card level.

Open source is key to successfully wrangling machine learning systems as it leverages the skills and coding work from entire communities and makes an ecosystem functional across technologies and applications.

The ROCm open ecosystem

This newly forming ecosystem is optimal for beginning or expanding your deep learning efforts whether you are the IT person looking to get pre-configured deep learning technologies in place, or the scientist who just needs access to HPC systems with one of the frameworks loaded. Either way, users can quickly get to work with their data. Developers also have full and open access to the hardware and software which speeds their work in developing frameworks.

Everything AMD develops for its Radeon Instinct system is open source and available on GitHub. The company also has docker containers for easier installs of ROCm drivers and frameworks which can be found on the ROCm site for Docker. Caffe and TensorFlow machine learning frameworks are offered now, with more to follow soon.

A deep learning solutions page has gone live, which features the four systems that service as the bud of the blooming ecosystem rooted in AMD technologies. The frameworks docker containers will be listed there as well.

This budding machine learning ecosystem is already bearing fruit for organizations looking to launch machine learning training and applications with a minimum of technical effort and expertise by combining:

Fast and easy server deployments

ROCm Open eCosystem and infrastructure

Deep learning framework docker containers

Optimized MIOpen framework libraries

The four systems forming the ecosystem center

“Data science is a mix of art and science—and digital grunt work. The reality is that as much as 80 percent of the work on which data scientists spend their time can be fully or partially automated,” according to a Deloitte report.

This newly forming ecosystem is focused on automating much of the machine learning processes. While complicated to achieve, the end results are far easier for organizations to use.

Deloitte identified five key vectors of progress that should help foster significantly greater adoption of machine learning by making it more accessible. “Three of these advancements—automation, data reduction, and training acceleration—make machine learning easier, cheaper, and/or faster. The others—model interpretability and local machine learning—open up applications in new areas,” according to the Deloitte report.

There are four prebuilt systems shaping this ecosystem early on. Each is provided by an independent partner and built on or for AMD’s Radeon Instinct and ROCm platforms, but their initial presentations are at varying levels of integration. While more partners will join the ecosystem over time, these four provide a solid bedrock for organizations looking to get started in machine learning now.

1) AMAX is providing systems with preloaded ROCm drivers and a choice of framework, either TensorFlow or Café, for machine learning, advanced rendering and HPC applications.

2) Exxact is similarly providing multi-GPU Radeon Instinct-based systems with preloaded ROCm drivers and frameworks for deep learning and HPC-class deployments, where performance per watt is important.

3) Inventec provides optimized high performance systems designed with AMD EPYC™ processors and Radeon Instinct compute technologies capable of delivering up to 100 teraflops of FP16 compute performance for deep learning and HPC workloads.

4) Supermicro is providing SuperServers supporting Radeon Instinct machine learning accelerators for AI, big data analytics, HPC, and business intelligence applications.

The payoff from leveraging the technologies in a machine learning ecosystem potentially comes in many forms.

“A growing number of tools and techniques for data science automation, some offered by established companies and others by venture-backed start-ups, can help reduce the time required to execute a machine learning proof of concept from months to days. And, automating data science means augmenting data scientists’ productivity in the face of severe talent shortages,” say the Deloitte researchers.