Tag Archives: deep learning

GPU workloads on AWS Batch

Post Syndicated from Josh Rad original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/gpu-workloads-on-aws-batch/

Contributed by Manuel Manzano Hoss, Cloud Support Engineer

I remember playing around with graphics processing units (GPUs) workload examples in 2017 when the Deep Learning on AWS Batch post was published by my colleague Kiuk Chung. He provided an example of how to train a convolutional neural network (CNN), the LeNet architecture, to recognize handwritten digits from the MNIST dataset using Apache MXNet as the framework. Back then, to run such jobs with GPU capabilities, I had to do the following:

  • Create a custom GPU-enabled AMI that had installed Docker, the ECS agent, NVIDIA driver and container runtime, and CUDA.
  • Identify the type of P2 EC2 instance that had the required amount of GPU for my job.
  • Check the amount of vCPUs that it offered (even if I was not interested on using them).
  • Specify that number of vCPUs for my job.

All that, when I didn’t have any certainty that the instance was going to have the GPU required available when my job was already running. Back then, there was no GPU pinning. Other jobs running on the same EC2 instance were able to use that GPU, making the orchestration of my jobs a tricky task.

Fast forward two years. Today, AWS Batch announced integrated support for Amazon EC2 Accelerated Instances. It is now possible to specify an amount of GPU as a resource that AWS Batch considers in choosing the EC2 instance to run your job, along with vCPU and memory. That allows me to take advantage of the main benefits of using AWS Batch, the compute resource selection algorithm and job scheduler. It also frees me from having to check the types of EC2 instances that have enough GPU.

Also, I can take advantage of the Amazon ECS GPU-optimized AMI maintained by AWS. It comes with the NVIDIA drivers and all the necessary software to run GPU-enabled jobs. When I allow the P2 or P3 instance types on my compute environment, AWS Batch launches my compute resources using the Amazon ECS GPU-optimized AMI automatically.

In other words, now I don’t worry about the GPU task list mentioned earlier. I can focus on deciding which framework and command to run on my GPU-accelerated workload. At the same time, I’m now sure that my jobs have access to the required performance, as physical GPUs are pinned to each job and not shared among them.

A GPU race against the past

As a kind of GPU-race exercise, I checked a similar example to the one from Kiuk’s post, to see how fast it could be to run a GPU-enabled job now. I used the AWS Management Console to demonstrate how simple the steps are.

In this case, I decided to use the deep neural network architecture called multilayer perceptron (MLP), not the LeNet CNN, to compare the validation accuracy between them.

To make the test even simpler and faster to implement, I thought I would use one of the recently announced AWS Deep Learning containers, which come pre-packed with different frameworks and ready-to-process data. I chose the container that comes with MXNet and Python 2.7, customized for Training and GPU. For more information about the Docker images available, see the AWS Deep Learning Containers documentation.

In the AWS Batch console, I created a managed compute environment with the default settings, allowing AWS Batch to create the required IAM roles on my behalf.

On the configuration of the compute resources, I selected the P2 and P3 families of instances, as those are the type of instance with GPU capabilities. You can select On-Demand Instances, but in this case I decided to use Spot Instances to take advantage of the discounts that this pricing model offers. I left the defaults for all other settings, selecting the AmazonEC2SpotFleetRole role that I created the first time that I used Spot Instances:

Finally, I also left the network settings as default. My compute environment selected the default VPC, three subnets, and a security group. They are enough to run my jobs and at the same time keep my environment safe by limiting connections from outside the VPC:

I created a job queue, GPU_JobQueue, attaching it to the compute environment that I just created:

Next, I registered the same job definition that I would have created following Kiuk’s post. I specified enough memory to run this test, one vCPU, and the AWS Deep Learning Docker image that I chose, in this case mxnet-training:1.4.0-gpu-py27-cu90-ubuntu16.04. The amount of GPU required was in this case, one. To have access to run the script, the container must run as privileged, or using the root user.

Finally, I submitted the job. I first cloned the MXNet repository for the train_mnist.py Python script. Then I ran the script itself, with the parameter –gpus 0 to indicate that the assigned GPU should be used. The job inherits all the other parameters from the job definition:

sh -c 'git clone -b 1.3.1 https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet.git && python /incubator-mxnet/example/image-classification/train_mnist.py --gpus 0'

That’s all, and my GPU-enabled job was running. It took me less than two minutes to go from zero to having the job submitted. This is the log of my job, from which I removed the iterations from epoch 1 to 18 to make it shorter:

14:32:31     Cloning into 'incubator-mxnet'...

14:33:50     Note: checking out '19c501680183237d52a862e6ae1dc4ddc296305b'.

14:33:51     INFO:root:start with arguments Namespace(add_stn=False, batch_size=64, disp_batches=100, dtype='float32', gc_threshold=0.5, gc_type='none', gpus='0', initializer='default', kv_store='device', load_epoch=None, loss='', lr=0.05, lr_factor=0.1, lr_step_epochs='10', macrobatch_size=0, model_prefix=None, mom=0.9, monitor=0, network='mlp', num_classes=10, num_epochs=20, num_examples=60000, num_layers=No

14:33:51     DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:Starting new HTTP connection (1): yann.lecun.com:80

14:33:54     DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:http://yann.lecun.com:80 "GET /exdb/mnist/train-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz HTTP/1.1" 200 28881

14:33:55     DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:Starting new HTTP connection (1): yann.lecun.com:80

14:33:55     DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:http://yann.lecun.com:80 "GET /exdb/mnist/train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz HTTP/1.1" 200 9912422

14:33:59     DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:Starting new HTTP connection (1): yann.lecun.com:80

14:33:59     DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:http://yann.lecun.com:80 "GET /exdb/mnist/t10k-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz HTTP/1.1" 200 4542

14:33:59     DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:Starting new HTTP connection (1): yann.lecun.com:80

14:34:00     DEBUG:urllib3.connectionpool:http://yann.lecun.com:80 "GET /exdb/mnist/t10k-images-idx3-ubyte.gz HTTP/1.1" 200 1648877

14:34:04     INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [0-100] Speed: 37038.30 samples/sec accuracy=0.793472

14:34:04     INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [100-200] Speed: 36457.89 samples/sec accuracy=0.906719

14:34:04     INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [200-300] Speed: 36981.20 samples/sec accuracy=0.927500

14:34:04     INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [300-400] Speed: 36925.04 samples/sec accuracy=0.935156

14:34:04     INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [400-500] Speed: 37262.36 samples/sec accuracy=0.940156

14:34:05     INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [500-600] Speed: 37729.64 samples/sec accuracy=0.942813

14:34:05     INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [600-700] Speed: 37493.55 samples/sec accuracy=0.949063

14:34:05     INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [700-800] Speed: 37320.80 samples/sec accuracy=0.953906

14:34:05     INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [800-900] Speed: 37705.85 samples/sec accuracy=0.958281

14:34:05     INFO:root:Epoch[0] Train-accuracy=0.924024

14:34:05     INFO:root:Epoch[0] Time cost=1.633

...  LOGS REMOVED

14:34:44     INFO:root:Epoch[19] Batch [0-100] Speed: 36864.44 samples/sec accuracy=0.999691

14:34:44     INFO:root:Epoch[19] Batch [100-200] Speed: 37088.35 samples/sec accuracy=1.000000

14:34:44     INFO:root:Epoch[19] Batch [200-300] Speed: 36706.91 samples/sec accuracy=0.999687

14:34:44     INFO:root:Epoch[19] Batch [300-400] Speed: 37941.19 samples/sec accuracy=0.999687

14:34:44     INFO:root:Epoch[19] Batch [400-500] Speed: 37180.97 samples/sec accuracy=0.999844

14:34:44     INFO:root:Epoch[19] Batch [500-600] Speed: 37122.30 samples/sec accuracy=0.999844

14:34:45     INFO:root:Epoch[19] Batch [600-700] Speed: 37199.37 samples/sec accuracy=0.999687

14:34:45     INFO:root:Epoch[19] Batch [700-800] Speed: 37284.93 samples/sec accuracy=0.999219

14:34:45     INFO:root:Epoch[19] Batch [800-900] Speed: 36996.80 samples/sec accuracy=0.999844

14:34:45     INFO:root:Epoch[19] Train-accuracy=0.999733

14:34:45     INFO:root:Epoch[19] Time cost=1.617

14:34:45     INFO:root:Epoch[19] Validation-accuracy=0.983579

Summary

As you can see, after AWS Batch launched the instance, the job took slightly more than two minutes to run. I spent roughly five minutes from start to finish. That was much faster than the time that I was previously spending just to configure the AMI. Using the AWS CLI, one of the AWS SDKs, or AWS CloudFormation, the same environment could be created even faster.

From a training point of view, I lost on the validation accuracy, as the results obtained using the LeNet CNN are higher than when using an MLP network. On the other hand, my job was faster, with a time cost of 1.6 seconds in average for each epoch. As the software stack evolves, and increased hardware capabilities come along, these numbers keep improving, but that shouldn’t mean extra complexity. Using managed primitives like the one presented in this post enables a simpler implementation.

I encourage you to test this example and see for yourself how just a few clicks or commands lets you start running GPU jobs with AWS Batch. Then, it is just a matter of replacing the Docker image that I used for one with the framework of your choice, TensorFlow, Caffe, PyTorch, Keras, etc. Start to run your GPU-enabled machine learning, deep learning, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics, or computational finance workloads. It’s faster and easier than ever.

If you decide to give it a try, have any doubt or just want to let me know what you think about this post, please write in the comments section!

Yoga training with YogAI and a Raspberry Pi smart mirror | The MagPi issue 80

Post Syndicated from Rob Zwetsloot original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/yoga-training-with-yogai-and-a-raspberry-pi-smart-mirror-the-magpi-issue-80/

Running on a smart mirror, YogAI uses a database of postures, image recognition software, and the magic of mirrors to not only show users their current posture but to also teach them how to correct their posture to reach peak yogi-ness. Here’s Rob Zwetsloot from The MagPi magazine with more.

yogai

We’ve seen many ‘magic mirror’ projects over the past few years, featuring a TV screen behind the glass to show useful information, but YogAI takes the concept to a whole new level by providing an AI personal trainer to guide and correct your yoga positions.

Self-confessed fitness nuts Salma Mayorquin and Terry Rodriguez thought that having a personal trainer could be a way to keep track of their fitness progress, so why not try to make a virtual one? “With [deep learning] models like pose estimation, we figured there was a way we could make a program that could track how we were exercising and started experimenting from there,” says Terry.

“YogAI guides users through a flow of yoga poses, offering generally helpful advice when the camera senses a user not in the correct pose,” explains Salma. “At the heart, YogAI uses pose estimation to find reference key points on the body. This is used to understand and classify common yoga poses.”

Users interact with YogAI through both visual feedback via the mirror display, and a voice interface — using the Snips AIR voice assistant — which enables the user to give spoken commands to start, stop, pause, and restart a yoga session. YogAI also talks back through the Flite voice synthesiser to guide the yogi to achieve the correct poses.

While a prototype magic mirror only took the experienced makers a week to build, training the AI to recognise yoga poses in real time was a trickier task. “We need our computer vision models to run quickly so that we have enough resolution in time to identify the move,” reveals Terry.

Strike a pose

A Raspberry Pi 3 interprets the camera images in real time, detecting key body points to display the pose on the mirror and classify it using a deep-learning model trained with a dataset of around 35000 samples.

However, the pair found that the Pi could only run image inference at one frame every 4–5 seconds, resulting in lag. A workaround was soon found: “Shrinking our pose estimation models down using TensorFlow Lite, we were able to bring our frame rate from 0.2 fps to 2.5 fps,” says Salma. “For faster inference, we will look for ways to reduce the model further. We also believe upgrading to the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 will increase the performance significantly.”


“Overall, the accuracy across a dozen common poses is roughly 80%,” divulges Terry. “Not surprisingly, we find similar pose variants, e.g. warrior poses, can be a source of confusion. When the head/face is blocked, the pose estimates degrade, which impacts our classification of poses like downward dog.”

More intense exercise

As well as using the system for yoga, Salma and Terry are planning to adapt YogAI to monitor more energetic workouts. “We’re interested in strength training, and others have suggested dance and karate katas,” says Terry. “We think YogAI is well-positioned to perform more general health and personal wellness tasks.”

“We want to integrate with popular health wearables,” adds Salma. “A smart watch with an accelerometer and heart rate monitor can introduce a lot of important context to bring YogAI closer to our vision for a smart mirror yoga instructor and toward a personal wellness platform.”

More from The MagPi magazine

The MagPi magazine issue 80 is out today. Buy your copy now from the Raspberry Pi Press store, major newsagents in the UK, or Barnes & Noble, Fry’s, or Micro Center in the US. Or, download your free PDF copy from The MagPi magazine website.

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The post Yoga training with YogAI and a Raspberry Pi smart mirror | The MagPi issue 80 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Scheduling GPUs for deep learning tasks on Amazon ECS

Post Syndicated from Anuneet Kumar original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/scheduling-gpus-for-deep-learning-tasks-on-amazon-ecs/

This post is contributed by Brent Langston – Sr. Developer Advocate, Amazon Container Services

Last week, AWS announced enhanced Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) support for GPU-enabled EC2 instances. This means that now GPUs are first class resources that can be requested in your task definition, and scheduled on your cluster by ECS.

Previously, to schedule a GPU workload, you had to maintain your own custom configured AMI, with a custom configured Docker runtime. You also had to use custom vCPU logic as a stand-in for assigning your GPU workloads to GPU instances. Even when all that was in place, there was still no pinning of a GPU to a task. One task might consume more GPU resources than it should. This could cause other tasks to not have a GPU available.

Now, AWS maintains an ECS-optimized AMI that includes the correct NVIDIA drivers and Docker customizations. You can use this AMI to provision your GPU workloads. With this enhancement, GPUs can also be requested directly in the task definition. Like allocating CPU or RAM to a task, now you can explicitly request a number of GPUs to be allocated to your task. The scheduler looks for matching resources on the cluster to place those tasks. The GPUs are pinned to the task for as long as the task is running, and can’t be allocated to any other tasks.

I thought I’d see how easy it is to deploy GPU workloads to my ECS cluster. I’m working in the US-EAST-2 (Ohio) region, from my AWS Cloud9 IDE, so these commands work for Amazon Linux. Feel free to adapt to your environment as necessary.

If you’d like to run this example yourself, you can find all the code in this GitHub repo. If you run this example in your own account, be aware of the instance pricing, and clean up your resources when your experiment is complete.

Clone the repo using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/brentley/tensorflow-container.git

Setup

You need the latest version of the AWS CLI (for this post, I used 1.16.98):

echo “export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$HOME/bin:$PATH” >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile
pip install --user -U awscli

Provision an ECS cluster, with two C5 instances, and two P3 instances:

aws cloudformation deploy --stack-name tensorflow-test --template-file cluster-cpu-gpu.yml --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM

While AWS CloudFormation is provisioning resources, examine the template used to build your infrastructure. Open `cluster-cpu-gpu.yml`, and you see that you are provisioning a test VPC with two c5.2xlarge instances, and two p3.2xlarge instances. This gives you one NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU per instance, for a total of two GPUs to run training tasks.

I adapted the TensorFlow benchmark Docker container to create a training workload. I use this container to compare the GPU scheduling and runtime.

When the CloudFormation stack is deployed, register a task definition with the ECS service:

aws ecs register-task-definition --cli-input-json file://gpu-1-taskdef.json

To request GPU resources in the task definition, the only change needed is to include a GPU resource requirement in the container definition:

            "resourceRequirements": [
                {
                    "type": "GPU",
                    "value": "1"
                }
            ],

Including this resource requirement ensures that the ECS scheduler allocates the task to an instance with a free GPU resource.

Launch a single-GPU training workload

Now you’re ready to launch the first GPU workload.

export cluster=$(aws cloudformation describe-stacks --stack-name tensorflow-test --query 
'Stacks[0].Outputs[?OutputKey==`ClusterName`].OutputValue' --output text) 
echo $cluster
aws ecs run-task --cluster $cluster --task-definition tensorflow-1-gpu

When you launch the task, the output shows the `guIds` values that are assigned to the task. This GPU is pinned to this task, and can’t be shared with any other tasks. If all GPUs are allocated, you can’t schedule additional GPU tasks until a running task with a GPU completes. That frees the GPU to be scheduled again.

When you look at the log output in Amazon CloudWatch Logs, you see that the container discovered one GPU: `/gpu0` and the training benchmark trained at a rate of 321.16 images/sec.

With your two p3.2xlarge nodes in the cluster, you are limited to two concurrent single GPU based workloads. To scale horizontally, you could add additional p3.2xlarge nodes. This would limit your workloads to a single GPU each.  To scale vertically, you could bump up the instance type,  which would allow you to assign multiple GPUs to a single task.  Now, let’s see how fast your TensorFlow container can train when assigned multiple GPUs.

Launch a multiple-GPU training workload

To begin, replace the p3.2xlarge instances with p3.16xlarge instances. This gives your cluster two instances that each have eight GPUs, for a total of 16 GPUs that can be allocated.

aws cloudformation deploy --stack-name tensorflow-test --template-file cluster-cpu-gpu.yml --parameter-overrides GPUInstanceType=p3.16xlarge --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM

When the CloudFormation deploy is complete, register two more task definitions to launch your benchmark container requesting more GPUs:

aws ecs register-task-definition --cli-input-json file://gpu-4-taskdef.json  
aws ecs register-task-definition --cli-input-json file://gpu-8-taskdef.json

Next, launch two TensorFlow benchmark containers, one requesting four GPUs, and one requesting eight GPUs:

aws ecs run-task --cluster $cluster --task-definition tensorflow-4-gpu
aws ecs run-task --cluster $cluster --task-definition tensorflow-8-gpu

With each task request, GPUs are allocated: four in the first request, and eight in the second request. Again, these GPUs are pinned to the task, and not usable by any other task until these tasks are complete.

Check the log output in CloudWatch Logs:

On the “devices” lines, you can see that the container discovered and used four (or eight) GPUs. Also, the total images/sec improved to 1297.41 with four GPUs, and 1707.23 with eight GPUs.

Because you can pin single or multiple GPUs to a task, running advanced GPU based training tasks on Amazon ECS is easier than ever!

Cleanup

To clean up your running resources, delete the CloudFormation stack:

aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name tensorflow-test

Conclusion

For more information, see Working with GPUs on Amazon ECS.

If you want to keep up on the latest container info from AWS, please follow me on Twitter and tweet any questions! @brentContained

Some quick thoughts on the public discussion regarding facial recognition and Amazon Rekognition this past week

Post Syndicated from Dr. Matt Wood original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/some-quick-thoughts-on-the-public-discussion-regarding-facial-recognition-and-amazon-rekognition-this-past-week/

We have seen a lot of discussion this past week about the role of Amazon Rekognition in facial recognition, surveillance, and civil liberties, and we wanted to share some thoughts.

Amazon Rekognition is a service we announced in 2016. It makes use of new technologies – such as deep learning – and puts them in the hands of developers in an easy-to-use, low-cost way. Since then, we have seen customers use the image and video analysis capabilities of Amazon Rekognition in ways that materially benefit both society (e.g. preventing human trafficking, inhibiting child exploitation, reuniting missing children with their families, and building educational apps for children), and organizations (enhancing security through multi-factor authentication, finding images more easily, or preventing package theft). Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not the only provider of services like these, and we remain excited about how image and video analysis can be a driver for good in the world, including in the public sector and law enforcement.

There have always been and will always be risks with new technology capabilities. Each organization choosing to employ technology must act responsibly or risk legal penalties and public condemnation. AWS takes its responsibilities seriously. But we believe it is the wrong approach to impose a ban on promising new technologies because they might be used by bad actors for nefarious purposes in the future. The world would be a very different place if we had restricted people from buying computers because it was possible to use that computer to do harm. The same can be said of thousands of technologies upon which we all rely each day. Through responsible use, the benefits have far outweighed the risks.

Customers are off to a great start with Amazon Rekognition; the evidence of the positive impact this new technology can provide is strong (and growing by the week), and we’re excited to continue to support our customers in its responsible use.

-Dr. Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at AWS

Amazon SageMaker Updates – Tokyo Region, CloudFormation, Chainer, and GreenGrass ML

Post Syndicated from Randall Hunt original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/sagemaker-tokyo-summit-2018/

Today, at the AWS Summit in Tokyo we announced a number of updates and new features for Amazon SageMaker. Starting today, SageMaker is available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo)! SageMaker also now supports CloudFormation. A new machine learning framework, Chainer, is now available in the SageMaker Python SDK, in addition to MXNet and Tensorflow. Finally, support for running Chainer models on several devices was added to AWS Greengrass Machine Learning.

Amazon SageMaker Chainer Estimator


Chainer is a popular, flexible, and intuitive deep learning framework. Chainer networks work on a “Define-by-Run” scheme, where the network topology is defined dynamically via forward computation. This is in contrast to many other frameworks which work on a “Define-and-Run” scheme where the topology of the network is defined separately from the data. A lot of developers enjoy the Chainer scheme since it allows them to write their networks with native python constructs and tools.

Luckily, using Chainer with SageMaker is just as easy as using a TensorFlow or MXNet estimator. In fact, it might even be a bit easier since it’s likely you can take your existing scripts and use them to train on SageMaker with very few modifications. With TensorFlow or MXNet users have to implement a train function with a particular signature. With Chainer your scripts can be a little bit more portable as you can simply read from a few environment variables like SM_MODEL_DIR, SM_NUM_GPUS, and others. We can wrap our existing script in a if __name__ == '__main__': guard and invoke it locally or on sagemaker.


import argparse
import os

if __name__ =='__main__':

    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()

    # hyperparameters sent by the client are passed as command-line arguments to the script.
    parser.add_argument('--epochs', type=int, default=10)
    parser.add_argument('--batch-size', type=int, default=64)
    parser.add_argument('--learning-rate', type=float, default=0.05)

    # Data, model, and output directories
    parser.add_argument('--output-data-dir', type=str, default=os.environ['SM_OUTPUT_DATA_DIR'])
    parser.add_argument('--model-dir', type=str, default=os.environ['SM_MODEL_DIR'])
    parser.add_argument('--train', type=str, default=os.environ['SM_CHANNEL_TRAIN'])
    parser.add_argument('--test', type=str, default=os.environ['SM_CHANNEL_TEST'])

    args, _ = parser.parse_known_args()

    # ... load from args.train and args.test, train a model, write model to args.model_dir.

Then, we can run that script locally or use the SageMaker Python SDK to launch it on some GPU instances in SageMaker. The hyperparameters will get passed in to the script as CLI commands and the environment variables above will be autopopulated. When we call fit the input channels we pass will be populated in the SM_CHANNEL_* environment variables.


from sagemaker.chainer.estimator import Chainer
# Create my estimator
chainer_estimator = Chainer(
    entry_point='example.py',
    train_instance_count=1,
    train_instance_type='ml.p3.2xlarge',
    hyperparameters={'epochs': 10, 'batch-size': 64}
)
# Train my estimator
chainer_estimator.fit({'train': train_input, 'test': test_input})

# Deploy my estimator to a SageMaker Endpoint and get a Predictor
predictor = chainer_estimator.deploy(
    instance_type="ml.m4.xlarge",
    initial_instance_count=1
)

Now, instead of bringing your own docker container for training and hosting with Chainer, you can just maintain your script. You can see the full sagemaker-chainer-containers on github. One of my favorite features of the new container is built-in chainermn for easy multi-node distribution of your chainer training jobs.

There’s a lot more documentation and information available in both the README and the example notebooks.

AWS GreenGrass ML with Chainer

AWS GreenGrass ML now includes a pre-built Chainer package for all devices powered by Intel Atom, NVIDIA Jetson, TX2, and Raspberry Pi. So, now GreenGrass ML provides pre-built packages for TensorFlow, Apache MXNet, and Chainer! You can train your models on SageMaker then easily deploy it to any GreenGrass-enabled device using GreenGrass ML.

JAWS UG

I want to give a quick shout out to all of our wonderful and inspirational friends in the JAWS UG who attended the AWS Summit in Tokyo today. I’ve very much enjoyed seeing your pictures of the summit. Thanks for making Japan an amazing place for AWS developers! I can’t wait to visit again and meet with all of you.

– Randall

Own your own working Pokémon Pokédex!

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/deep-learning-pokedex/

Squeal with delight as your inner Pokémon trainer witnesses the wonder of Adrian Rosebrock’s deep learning Pokédex.

Creating a real-life Pokedex with a Raspberry Pi, Python, and Deep Learning

This video demos a real-like Pokedex, complete with visual recognition, that I created using a Raspberry Pi, Python, and Deep Learning. You can find the entire blog post, including code, using this link: https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2018/04/30/a-fun-hands-on-deep-learning-project-for-beginners-students-and-hobbyists/ Music credit to YouTube user “No Copyright” for providing royalty free music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXpjqURczn8

The history of Pokémon in 30 seconds

The Pokémon franchise was created by video game designer Satoshi Tajiri in 1995. In the fictional world of Pokémon, Pokémon Trainers explore the vast landscape, catching and training small creatures called Pokémon. To date, there are 802 different types of Pokémon. They range from the ever recognisable Pikachu, a bright yellow electric Pokémon, to the highly sought-after Shiny Charizard, a metallic, playing-card-shaped Pokémon that your mate Alex claims she has in mint condition, but refuses to show you.

Pokemon GIF

In the world of Pokémon, children as young as ten-year-old protagonist and all-round annoyance Ash Ketchum are allowed to leave home and wander the wilderness. There, they hunt vicious, deadly creatures in the hope of becoming a Pokémon Master.

Adrian’s deep learning Pokédex

Adrian is a bit of a deep learning pro, as demonstrated by his Santa/Not Santa detector, which we wrote about last year. For that project, he also provided a great explanation of what deep learning actually is. In a nutshell:

…a subfield of machine learning, which is, in turn, a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI).While AI embodies a large, diverse set of techniques and algorithms related to automatic reasoning (inference, planning, heuristics, etc), the machine learning subfields are specifically interested in pattern recognition and learning from data.

As with his earlier Raspberry Pi project, Adrian uses the Keras deep learning model and the TensorFlow backend, plus a few other packages such as Adrian’s own imutils functions and OpenCV.

Adrian trained a Convolutional Neural Network using Keras on a dataset of 1191 Pokémon images, obtaining 96.84% accuracy. As Adrian explains, this model is able to identify Pokémon via still image and video. It’s perfect for creating a Pokédex – an interactive Pokémon catalogue that should, according to the franchise, be able to identify and read out information on any known Pokémon when captured by camera. More information on model training can be found on Adrian’s blog.

Adrian Rosebeck deep learning pokemon pokedex

For the physical build, a Raspberry Pi 3 with camera module is paired with the Raspberry Pi 7″ touch display to create a portable Pokédex. And while Adrian comments that the same result can be achieved using your home computer and a webcam, that’s not how Adrian rolls as a Raspberry Pi fan.

Adrian Rosebeck deep learning pokemon pokedex

Plus, the smaller size of the Pi is perfect for one of you to incorporate this deep learning model into a 3D-printed Pokédex for ultimate Pokémon glory, pretty please, thank you.

Adrian Rosebeck deep learning pokemon pokedex

Adrian has gone into impressive detail about how the project works and how you can create your own on his blog, pyimagesearch. So if you’re interested in learning more about deep learning, and making your own Pokédex, be sure to visit.

The post Own your own working Pokémon Pokédex! appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Amazon SageMaker Now Supports Additional Instance Types, Local Mode, Open Sourced Containers, MXNet and Tensorflow Updates

Post Syndicated from Randall Hunt original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-sagemaker-roundup-sf/

Amazon SageMaker continues to iterate quickly and release new features on behalf of customers. Starting today, SageMaker adds support for many new instance types, local testing with the SDK, and Apache MXNet 1.1.0 and Tensorflow 1.6.0. Let’s take a quick look at each of these updates.

New Instance Types

Amazon SageMaker customers now have additional options for right-sizing their workloads for notebooks, training, and hosting. Notebook instances now support almost all T2, M4, P2, and P3 instance types with the exception of t2.micro, t2.small, and m4.large instances. Model training now supports nearly all M4, M5, C4, C5, P2, and P3 instances with the exception of m4.large, c4.large, and c5.large instances. Finally, model hosting now supports nearly all T2, M4, M5, C4, C5, P2, and P3 instances with the exception of m4.large instances. Many customers can take advantage of the newest P3, C5, and M5 instances to get the best price/performance for their workloads. Customers also take advantage of the burstable compute model on T2 instances for endpoints or notebooks that are used less frequently.

Open Sourced Containers, Local Mode, and TensorFlow 1.6.0 and MXNet 1.1.0

Today Amazon SageMaker has open sourced the MXNet and Tensorflow deep learning containers that power the MXNet and Tensorflow estimators in the SageMaker SDK. The ability to write Python scripts that conform to simple interface is still one of my favorite SageMaker features and now those containers can be additionally customized to include any additional libraries. You can download these containers locally to iterate and experiment which can accelerate your debugging cycle. When you’re ready go from local testing to production training and hosting you just change one line of code.

These containers launch with support for Tensorflow 1.6.0 and MXNet 1.1.0 as well. Tensorflow has a number of new 1.6.0 features including support for CUDA 9.0, cuDNN 7, and AVX instructions which allows for significant speedups in many training applications. MXNet 1.1.0 adds a number of new features including a Text API mxnet.text with support for text processing, indexing, glossaries, and more. Two of the really cool pre-trained embeddings included are GloVe and fastText.
<

Available Now
All of the features mentioned above are available today. As always please let us know on Twitter or in the comments below if you have any questions or if you’re building something interesting. Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go experiment with some of those new MXNet APIs!

– Randall

AWS Online Tech Talks – March 2018

Post Syndicated from Betsy Chernoff original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-online-tech-talks-march-2018/

Can you believe it’s already the month of March? With some great new Tech Talks available this month, there’s no better time to grow your knowledge about AWS services and solutions.

AWS Online Tech Talks

March 2018– Schedule

Below is the full schedule for the live, online technical sessions being held during the month of March. Make sure to register ahead of time so you won’t miss out on these free talks conducted by AWS subject matter experts.

Webinars featured this month are:

Analytics & Big Data

March 21, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Amazon Elasticsearch Service Deep Dive (300) – Learn how to run Elasticsearch using Amazon Elasticsearch Service.

March 28, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Deep Dive on Amazon Athena (300) – Dive deep into the most common Amazon Athena use cases, including working with other AWS services.

Compute

March 26, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – High Performance Computing in the Cloud (200) – Learn how AWS is enabling faster time to results and higher ROI when it comes to solving the big problems in science, engineering and business with high performance computing in the cloud.

March 27, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Introduction to Hybrid Cloud on AWS (200) – Learn how AWS is building the industry’s broadest capabilities for Hybrid Cloud deployments.

Containers

March 19, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Running Kubernetes with Amazon EKS (200) – Learn about how Amazon EKS makes it easy to run and scale Kubernetes in the cloud.

Databases

March 21, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Best Practices for Migrating Oracle Databases to the Cloud (200) – Learn best practices for migrating your Oracle databases to the cloud.

DevOps

March 21, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Life of a Code Change to a Tier 1 Service (200) – Come follow the journey of an AWS code change on its way to production.

Enterprise

March 26, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Improve Efficiency by Migrating Messaging to Amazon MQ (200) – Learn how Amazon MQ makes it easy for enterprises, like GE, to save time and money by migrating to a managed message broker.

IoT

March 22, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Learn Step by Step How iDevices Uses AWS IoT Analytics (300) – Learn how iDevices, with AWS IoT Analytics, built an anomaly system and gains deep insights into user behavior.

Machine Learning

March 20, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Working with Scalable Machine Learning Algorithms in Amazon SageMaker (400) – Get an introduction the collection of distributed streaming machine learning algorithms that come with Amazon SageMaker.

March 22, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Enabling Deep Learning in IoT Applications with Apache MXNet (200) – Learn how to use deep learning in IoT apps using Apache MXNet.

March 28, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 02:00 PM PT – Media Processing Workflows at High Velocity and Scale using AI and ML (200) – Hear how AWS customers have improved media supply chains using AI in areas such as metadata tagging (Rekognition and Comprehend), translations, transcriptions, and cloud services (Elemental).

Management Tools

March 19, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Achieving Global Consistency Using AWS CloudFormation StackSets (300) – Learn how to centrally manage your accounts and regions using AWS CloudFormation StackSets.

Mobile

March 22, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – New Mobile CLI and Console Experience (200) – Learn how AWS Mobile Services has introduced a new CLI and streamlined console experience in order to simplify and speed up the development of mobile applications with innovative AWS features and back-end functionality.

Networking

March 28, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Deep Dive on New AWS Networking Features (300) – Learn how AWS PrivateLink, Direct Connect gateway, and new features with Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) come together to meet the needs of a modern enterprise.

Security, Identity & Compliance

March 27, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – The Evolution of Identity and Access Management on AWS (300) – Learn how identity federation can address many security and management scenarios as you expand your use of AWS.

March 29, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Navigating GDPR Compliance on AWS (300) – Get a walkthrough of potential General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) obligations and see how the AWS cloud offers services and features that are consistent with GDPR considerations in the ramp-up to the May 25th, 2018 enforcement date.

Serverless

March 20, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Operating Your Serverless API in Production at Scale (400) – Learn how to deploy, monitor, and manage serverless APIs in production.

Storage

March 27, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Enterprise Applications with Amazon EFS (300) – Join us for a technical deep dive on Amazon EFS, where you’ll learn tips and tricks for integrating your enterprise applications with Amazon EFS.

March 29, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Transforming Data Lakes with Amazon S3 Select & Amazon Glacier Select (300) – Join us for a webinar where we’ll demonstrate how Amazon S3 Select can increase analytics query performance up to 400%, and Amazon Glacier Select makes it practical to extend queries to archive storage, significantly reducing data lake storage costs.

Auto Scaling is now available for Amazon SageMaker

Post Syndicated from Ana Visneski original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/auto-scaling-is-now-available-for-amazon-sagemaker/

Kumar Venkateswar, Product Manager on the AWS ML Platforms Team, shares details on the announcement of Auto Scaling with Amazon SageMaker.

With Amazon SageMaker, thousands of customers have been able to easily build, train and deploy their machine learning (ML) models. Today, we’re making it even easier to manage production ML models, with Auto Scaling for Amazon SageMaker. Instead of having to manually manage the number of instances to match the scale that you need for your inferences, you can now have SageMaker automatically scale the number of instances based on an AWS Auto Scaling Policy.

SageMaker has made managing the ML process easier for many customers. We’ve seen customers take advantage of managed Jupyter notebooks and managed distributed training. We’ve seen customers deploying their models to SageMaker hosting for inferences, as they integrate machine learning with their applications. SageMaker makes this easy –  you don’t have to think about patching the operating system (OS) or frameworks on your inference hosts, and you don’t have to configure inference hosts across Availability Zones. You just deploy your models to SageMaker, and it handles the rest.

Until now, you have needed to specify the number and type of instances per endpoint (or production variant) to provide the scale that you need for your inferences. If your inference volume changes, you can change the number and/or type of instances that back each endpoint to accommodate that change, without incurring any downtime. In addition to making it easy to change provisioning, customers have asked us how we can make managing capacity for SageMaker even easier.

With Auto Scaling for Amazon SageMaker, in the SageMaker console, the AWS Auto Scaling API, and the AWS SDK, this becomes much easier. Now, instead of having to closely monitor inference volume, and change the endpoint configuration in response, customers can configure a scaling policy to be used by AWS Auto Scaling. Auto Scaling adjusts the number of instances up or down in response to actual workloads, determined by using Amazon CloudWatch metrics and target values defined in the policy. In this way, customers can automatically adjust their inference capacity to maintain predictable performance at a low cost. You simply specify the target inference throughput per instance and provide upper and lower bounds for the number of instances for each production variant. SageMaker will then monitor throughput per instance using Amazon CloudWatch alarms, and then it will adjust provisioned capacity up or down as needed.

After you configure the endpoint with Auto Scaling, SageMaker will continue to monitor your deployed models to automatically adjust the instance count. SageMaker will keep throughput within desired levels, in response to changes in application traffic. This makes it easier to manage models in production, and it can help reduce the cost of deployed models, as you no longer have to provision sufficient capacity in order to manage your peak load. Instead, you configure the limits to accommodate your minimum expected traffic and the maximum peak, and Amazon SageMaker will work within those limits to minimize cost.

How do you get started? Open the SageMaker console. For existing endpoints, you first access the endpoint to modify the settings.


Then, scroll to the Endpoint runtime settings section, select the variant, and choose Configure auto scaling.


First, configure the minimum and maximum number of instances.

Next, choose the throughput per instance at which you want to add an additional instance, given previous load testing.

You can optionally set cool down periods for scaling in or out, to avoid oscillation during periods of wide fluctuation in workload. If not, SageMaker will assume default values.

And that’s it! You now have an endpoint that will automatically scale with increasing inferences.

You pay for the capacity used at regular SageMaker pay-as-you-go pricing, so you no longer have to pay for unused capacity during relative idle periods!

Auto Scaling in Amazon SageMaker is available today in the US East (N. Virginia & Ohio), EU (Ireland), and U.S. West (Oregon) AWS regions. To learn more, see the Amazon SageMaker Auto Scaling documentation.

Kumar Venkateswar is a Product Manager in the AWS ML Platforms team, which includes Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Machine Learning, and the AWS Deep Learning AMIs. When not working, Kumar plays the violin and Magic: The Gathering.

 

 

 

 

 

 

AWS Online Tech Talks – January 2018

Post Syndicated from Ana Visneski original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-online-tech-talks-january-2018/

Happy New Year! Kick of 2018 right by expanding your AWS knowledge with a great batch of new Tech Talks. We’re covering some of the biggest launches from re:Invent including Amazon Neptune, Amazon Rekognition Video, AWS Fargate, AWS Cloud9, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, AWS PrivateLink, AWS Single-Sign On and more!

January 2018– Schedule

Noted below are the upcoming scheduled live, online technical sessions being held during the month of January. Make sure to register ahead of time so you won’t miss out on these free talks conducted by AWS subject matter experts.

Webinars featured this month are:

Monday January 22

Analytics & Big Data
11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT Analyze your Data Lake, Fast @ Any Scale  Lvl 300

Database
01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT Deep Dive on Amazon Neptune Lvl 200

Tuesday, January 23

Artificial Intelligence
9:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT  How to get the most out of Amazon Rekognition Video, a deep learning based video analysis service Lvl 300

Containers
11:00 AM – 11:45 AM Introducing AWS Fargate Lvl 200

Serverless
01:00 PM – 02:00 PM PT Overview of Serverless Application Deployment Patterns Lvl 400

Wednesday, January 24

DevOps
09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT Introducing AWS Cloud9  Lvl 200

Analytics & Big Data
11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT Deep Dive: Amazon Kinesis Video Streams
 Lvl 300
Database
01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT Introducing Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility Lvl 200

Thursday, January 25

Artificial Intelligence
09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT Introducing Amazon SageMaker Lvl 200

Mobile
11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT Ionic and React Hybrid Web/Native Mobile Applications with Mobile Hub Lvl 200

IoT
 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT Connected Product Development: Secure Cloud & Local Connectivity for Microcontroller-based Devices Lvl 200

Monday, January 29

Enterprise
11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT Enterprise Solutions Best Practices 100 Achieving Business Value with AWS Lvl 100

Compute
01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT Introduction to Amazon Lightsail Lvl 200

Tuesday, January 30

Security, Identity & Compliance
09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT Introducing Managed Rules for AWS WAF Lvl 200

Storage
11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT  Improving Backup & DR – AWS Storage Gateway Lvl 300

Compute
01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT  Introducing the New Simplified Access Model for EC2 Spot Instances Lvl 200

Wednesday, January 31

Networking
09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT  Deep Dive on AWS PrivateLink Lvl 300

Enterprise
11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT Preparing Your Team for a Cloud Transformation Lvl 200

Compute
01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT  The Nitro Project: Next-Generation EC2 Infrastructure Lvl 300

Thursday, February 1

Security, Identity & Compliance
09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT  Deep Dive on AWS Single Sign-On Lvl 300

Storage
11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT How to Build a Data Lake in Amazon S3 & Amazon Glacier Lvl 300

The deep learning Santa/Not Santa detector

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/deep-learning-santa-detector/

Did you see Mommy kissing Santa Claus? Or was it simply an imposter? The Not Santa detector is here to help solve the mystery once and for all.

Building a “Not Santa” detector on the Raspberry Pi using deep learning, Keras, and Python

The video is a demo of my “Not Santa” detector that I deployed to the Raspberry Pi. I trained the detector using deep learning, Keras, and Python. You can find the full source code and tutorial here: https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2017/12/18/keras-deep-learning-raspberry-pi/

Ho-ho-how does it work?

Note: Adrian Rosebrock is not Santa. But he does a good enough impression of the jolly old fellow that his disguise can fool a Raspberry Pi into thinking otherwise.

Raspberry Pi 'Not Santa' detector

We jest, but has anyone seen Adrian and Santa in the same room together?
Image c/o Adrian Rosebrock

But how is the Raspberry Pi able to detect the Santa-ness or Not-Santa-ness of people who walk into the frame?

Two words: deep learning

If you’re not sure what deep learning is, you’re not alone. It’s a hefty topic, and one that Adrian has written a book about, so I grilled him for a bluffers’ guide. In his words, deep learning is:

…a subfield of machine learning, which is, in turn a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI). While AI embodies a large, diverse set of techniques and algorithms related to automatic reasoning (inference, planning, heuristics, etc), the machine learning subfields are specifically interested in pattern recognition and learning from data.

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are a class of machine learning algorithms that can learn from data. We have been using ANNs successfully for over 60 years, but something special happened in the past 5 years — (1) we’ve been able to accumulate massive datasets, orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets, and (2) we have access to specialized hardware to train networks faster (i.e., GPUs).

Given these large datasets and specialized hardware, deeper neural networks can be trained, leading to the term “deep learning”.

So now we have a bird’s-eye view of deep learning, how does the detector detect?

Cameras and twinkly lights

Adrian used a model he had trained on two datasets to detect whether or not an image contains Santa. He deployed the Not Santa detector code to a Raspberry Pi, then attached a camera, speakers, and The Pi Hut’s 3D Xmas Tree.

Raspberry Pi 'Not Santa' detector

Components for Santa detection
Image c/o Adrian Rosebrock

The camera captures footage of Santa in the wild, while the Christmas tree add-on provides a twinkly notification, accompanied by a resonant ho, ho, ho from the speakers.

A deeper deep dive into deep learning

A full breakdown of the project and the workings of the Not Santa detector can be found on Adrian’s blog, PyImageSearch, which includes links to other deep learning and image classification tutorials using TensorFlow and Keras. It’s an excellent place to start if you’d like to understand more about deep learning.

Build your own Santa detector

Santa might catch on to Adrian’s clever detector and start avoiding the camera, and for that eventuality, we have our own Santa detector. It uses motion detection to notify you of his presence (and your presents!).

Raspberry Pi Santa detector

Check out our Santa Detector resource here and use a passive infrared sensor, Raspberry Pi, and Scratch to catch the big man in action.

The post The deep learning Santa/Not Santa detector appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

re:Invent Recap – Announcements to Boost Enterprise Innovation with Windows

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/reinvent-recap-announcements-to-boost-enterprise-innovation-with-windows/

My colleague Sandy Carter delivered the Enterprise Innovation State of the Union last week at AWS re:Invent. She wrote the guest post below to recap the announcements that she made from the stage.

— Jeff;

“I want my company to innovate, but I am not convinced we can execute successfully.” Far too many times I have heard this fear expressed by senior executives that I have met at different points in my career. In fact, a recent study published by Price Waterhouse Coopers found that while 93% of executives depend on innovation to drive growth, more than half are challenged to take innovative ideas to market quickly in a scalable way.

Many customers are struggling with how to drive enterprise innovation, so I was thrilled to share the stage at AWS re:Invent this past week with several senior executives who have successfully broken this mold to drive amazing enterprise innovation. In particular, I want to thank Parag Karnik from Johnson & Johnson, Bill Rothe from Hess Corporation, Dave Williams from Just Eat, and Olga Lagunova from Pitney Bowes for sharing their stories of innovation, creativity, and solid execution.

Among the many new announcements from AWS this past week, I am particularly excited about the following newly-launched AWS products and programs that I announced at re:Invent to drive new innovations by our enterprise customers:

AI: New Deep Learning Amazon Machine Image (AMI) on EC2 Windows
As I shared at re:Invent, customers such as Infor are already successfully leveraging artificial intelligence tools on AWS to deliver tailored, industry-specific applications to their customers. We want to facilitate more of our Windows developers to get started quickly and easily with AI, leveraging machine learning based tools with popular deep learning frameworks, such as Apache MXNet, TensorFlow, and Caffe2. In order to enable this, I announced at re:Invent that AWS now offers a new Deep Learning AMI for Microsoft Windows. The AMI is tailored to facilitate large scale training of deep-learning models, and enables quick and easy setup of Windows Server-based compute resources for machine learning applications.

IoT: Visualize and Analyze SQL and IoT Data
Forecasts show as many as 31 billion IoT devices by 2020. AWS wants every Windows customer to take advantage of the data available from their devices. Pitney Bowes, for example, now has more than 130,000 IoT devices streaming data to AWS. Using machine learning, Pitney Bowes enriches and analyzes data to enhance their customer experience, improve efficiencies, and create new data products. AWS IoT Analytics can now be leveraged to run analytics on IoT data and get insights that help you make better and more accurate decisions for IoT applications and machine learning use cases. AWS IoT Analytics can automatically enrich IoT device data with contextual metadata such as your SQL Server transactional data.

New Capabilities for .NET Developers on AWS
In addition to all of the enhancements we’ve introduced to deliver a first class experience to Windows developers on AWS, we announced that we are including .NET Core 2.0 support in AWS Lambda and AWS CodeBuild, which will be available for broader use early next year. .NET Core 2.0 packs a number of new features such as Razor pages, better compatibility with .NET framework, more than double the number of APIs compared to the previous versions, and much more. With this announcement, you will be able to take advantage of all latest .NET Core features on Lambda and CodeBuild for building modern serverless and DevOps centric solutions.

Simplified Backup for Windows Applications
We recently introduced application consistent snapshots with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). This enables you to take VSS snapshots with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) for your running Windows instances without the need to create custom scripts or to shut down the instances. This removes the overhead associated with backing up your Windows applications.

License optimization for BYOL
AWS provides you a wide variety of instance types and families that best meet your workload needs. If you are using software licensed by the number of vCPUs, you want the ability to further tweak vCPU count to optimize license spend. I announced the upcoming ability to optimize CPUs for EC2, giving you greater control over your EC2 instances on two fronts:

  1. You can specify a custom number of vCPUs when launching new instances to save on vCPU based licensing costs. For example, SQL Server licensing spend.
  2. You can disable Hyper-Threading Technology for workloads that perform well with single-threaded CPUs, like some high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

Using these capabilities, customers who bring their own license (BYOL) will be able to optimize their license usage and save on the license costs.

Server Migration Service for Hyper-V Virtual Machines
As Bill Rothe from Hess Corporation shared at re:Invent, Hess has successfully migrated a wide range of workloads to the cloud, including SQL Server, SharePoint, SAP HANA, and many others. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) now supports Hyper-V virtual machine (VM) migration, in order to further support enterprise migrations like these. AWS Server Migration Service will enable you to more easily co-ordinate large-scale server migrations from on-premise Hyper-V environments to AWS. AWS Server Migration Service allows you to automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes. The replicated volumes are encrypted in transit and saved as a new Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which can be launched as an EC2 instance on AWS.

Microsoft Premier Support for AWS End-Customers
I was pleased to announce that Microsoft and AWS have developed new areas of support integration to help ensure a great customer experience. Microsoft Premier Support is on board to help AWS assist end customers. AWS Support engineers can escalate directly to Microsoft Support on behalf of AWS customers running Microsoft workloads.

Best Practice Tools: HIPAA Compliance and Digital Innovation Workshop
In November, we updated our HIPAA-focused white paper, outlining how you can use AWS to create HIPAA-compliant applications. In the first quarter of next year, we will publish a HIPAA Implementation Guide that expands on our HIPAA Quick Start to enable you to follow strict security, compliance, and risk management controls for common healthcare use cases. I was also pleased to award a Digital Innovation Workshop to one of our customers in my re:Invent session, and look forward to seeing more customers take advantage of this workshop.

AWS: The Continuous Innovation Cloud
A common thread we see across customers is that continuous innovation from AWS enables their ongoing reinvention. Continuous innovation means that you are always getting a newer, better offering every single day. Sometimes it is in the form of brand new services and capabilities, and sometimes it is happening invisibly, under the covers where your environment just keeps getting better. I invite you to learn more about how you can accelerate your innovation journey with recently launched AWS services and AWS best practices. If you are migrating Windows workloads, speak with your AWS sales representative or an AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency Partner to learn how you can leverage our re:Think for Windows program for credits to start your migration.

– Sandy Carter, Vice President, AWS

AWS Contributes to Milestone 1.0 Release and Adds Model Serving Capability for Apache MXNet

Post Syndicated from Ana Visneski original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-contributes-to-milestone-1-0-release-and-adds-model-serving-capability-for-apache-mxnet/

Post by Dr. Matt Wood

Today AWS announced contributions to the milestone 1.0 release of the Apache MXNet deep learning engine including the introduction of a new model-serving capability for MXNet. The new capabilities in MXNet provide the following benefits to users:

1) MXNet is easier to use: The model server for MXNet is a new capability introduced by AWS, and it packages, runs, and serves deep learning models in seconds with just a few lines of code, making them accessible over the internet via an API endpoint and thus easy to integrate into applications. The 1.0 release also includes an advanced indexing capability that enables users to perform matrix operations in a more intuitive manner.

  • Model Serving enables set up of an API endpoint for prediction: It saves developers time and effort by condensing the task of setting up an API endpoint for running and integrating prediction functionality into an application to just a few lines of code. It bridges the barrier between Python-based deep learning frameworks and production systems through a Docker container-based deployment model.
  • Advanced indexing for array operations in MXNet: It is now more intuitive for developers to leverage the powerful array operations in MXNet. They can use the advanced indexing capability by leveraging existing knowledge of NumPy/SciPy arrays. For example, it supports MXNet NDArray and Numpy ndarray as index, e.g. (a[mx.nd.array([1,2], dtype = ‘int32’]).

2) MXNet is faster: The 1.0 release includes implementation of cutting-edge features that optimize the performance of training and inference. Gradient compression enables users to train models up to five times faster by reducing communication bandwidth between compute nodes without loss in convergence rate or accuracy. For speech recognition acoustic modeling like the Alexa voice, this feature can reduce network bandwidth by up to three orders of magnitude during training. With the support of NVIDIA Collective Communication Library (NCCL), users can train a model 20% faster on multi-GPU systems.

  • Optimize network bandwidth with gradient compression: In distributed training, each machine must communicate frequently with others to update the weight-vectors and thereby collectively build a single model, leading to high network traffic. Gradient compression algorithm enables users to train models up to five times faster by compressing the model changes communicated by each instance.
  • Optimize the training performance by taking advantage of NCCL: NCCL implements multi-GPU and multi-node collective communication primitives that are performance optimized for NVIDIA GPUs. NCCL provides communication routines that are optimized to achieve high bandwidth over interconnection between multi-GPUs. MXNet supports NCCL to train models about 20% faster on multi-GPU systems.

3) MXNet provides easy interoperability: MXNet now includes a tool for converting neural network code written with the Caffe framework to MXNet code, making it easier for users to take advantage of MXNet’s scalability and performance.

  • Migrate Caffe models to MXNet: It is now possible to easily migrate Caffe code to MXNet, using the new source code translation tool for converting Caffe code to MXNet code.

MXNet has helped developers and researchers make progress with everything from language translation to autonomous vehicles and behavioral biometric security. We are excited to see the broad base of users that are building production artificial intelligence applications powered by neural network models developed and trained with MXNet. For example, the autonomous driving company TuSimple recently piloted a self-driving truck on a 200-mile journey from Yuma, Arizona to San Diego, California using MXNet. This release also includes a full-featured and performance optimized version of the Gluon programming interface. The ease-of-use associated with it combined with the extensive set of tutorials has led significant adoption among developers new to deep learning. The flexibility of the interface has driven interest within the research community, especially in the natural language processing domain.

Getting started with MXNet
Getting started with MXNet is simple. To learn more about the Gluon interface and deep learning, you can reference this comprehensive set of tutorials, which covers everything from an introduction to deep learning to how to implement cutting-edge neural network models. If you’re a contributor to a machine learning framework, check out the interface specs on GitHub.

To get started with the Model Server for Apache MXNet, install the library with the following command:

$ pip install mxnet-model-server

The Model Server library has a Model Zoo with 10 pre-trained deep learning models, including the SqueezeNet 1.1 object classification model. You can start serving the SqueezeNet model with just the following command:

$ mxnet-model-server \
  --models squeezenet=https://s3.amazonaws.com/model-server/models/squeezenet_v1.1/squeezenet_v1.1.model \
  --service dms/model_service/mxnet_vision_service.py

Learn more about the Model Server and view the source code, reference examples, and tutorials here: https://github.com/awslabs/mxnet-model-server/

-Dr. Matt Wood

AWS Big Data & Analytics Sessions at Re:Invent 2017

Post Syndicated from Roy Ben-Alta original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/aws-big-data-analytics-sessions-at-reinvent-2017/

We can’t believe that there are just few days left before re:Invent 2017. If you are attending this year, you’ll want to check out our Big Data sessions! The Big Data and Machine Learning categories are bigger than ever. As in previous years, you can find these sessions in various tracks, including Analytics & Big Data, Deep Learning Summit, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Architecture, and Databases.

We have great sessions from organizations and companies like Vanguard, Cox Automotive, Pinterest, Netflix, FINRA, Amtrak, AmazonFresh, Sysco Foods, Twilio, American Heart Association, Expedia, Esri, Nextdoor, and many more. All sessions are recorded and made available on YouTube. In addition, all slide decks from the sessions will be available on SlideShare.net after the conference.

This post highlights the sessions that will be presented as part of the Analytics & Big Data track, as well as relevant sessions from other tracks like Architecture, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, and IoT. If you’re interested in Machine Learning sessions, don’t forget to check out our Guide to Machine Learning at re:Invent 2017.

This year’s session catalog contains the following breakout sessions.

DAT201 – AWS Database and Analytics State of the Union – Thursday

Raju Gulabani, VP, Database, Analytics and AI at AWS will discuss the evolution of database and analytics services in AWS, the new database and analytics services and features we launched this year, and our vision for continued innovation in this space. We are witnessing an unprecedented growth in the amount of data collected, in many different forms. Storage, management, and analysis of this data require database services that scale and perform in ways not possible before. AWS offers a collection of database and other data services—including Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon EMR—to process, store, manage, and analyze data. In this session, we provide an overview of AWS database and analytics services and discuss how customers are using these services today.

Deep dive customer use cases

ABD401 – How Netflix Monitors Applications in Near Real-Time with Amazon Kinesis
Thousands of services work in concert to deliver millions of hours of video streams to Netflix customers every day. These applications vary in size, function, and technology, but they all make use of the Netflix network to communicate. Understanding the interactions between these services is a daunting challenge both because of the sheer volume of traffic and the dynamic nature of deployments. In this session, we first discuss why Netflix chose Kinesis Streams to address these challenges at scale. We then dive deep into how Netflix uses Kinesis Streams to enrich network traffic logs and identify usage patterns in real time. Lastly, we cover how Netflix uses this system to build comprehensive dependency maps, increase network efficiency, and improve failure resiliency. From this session, you will learn how to build a real-time application monitoring system using network traffic logs and get real-time, actionable insights.

SRV319 – How Nextdoor Built a Scalable, Serverless Data Pipeline for Billions of Events per Day

In this session, learn how Nextdoor replaced their home-grown data pipeline based on a topology of Flume nodes with a completely serverless architecture based on Kinesis and Lambda. By making these changes, they improved both the reliability of their data and the delivery times of billions of records of data to their Amazon S3–based data lake and Amazon Redshift cluster. Nextdoor is a private social networking service for neighborhoods.

ABD205 – Taking a Page Out of Ivy Tech’s Book: Using Data for Student Success
Data speaks. Discover how Ivy Tech, the nation’s largest singly accredited community college, uses AWS to gather, analyze, and take action on student behavioral data for the betterment of over 3,100 students. This session outlines the process from inception to implementation across the state of Indiana and highlights how Ivy Tech’s model can be applied to your own complex business problems.

ABD207 – Leveraging AWS to Fight Financial Crime and Protect National Security
Banks aren’t known to share data and collaborate with one another. But that is exactly what the Mid-Sized Bank Coalition of America (MBCA) is doing to fight digital financial crime—and protect national security. Using the AWS Cloud, the MBCA developed a shared data analytics utility that processes terabytes of non-competitive customer account, transaction, and government risk data. The intelligence produced from the data helps banks increase the efficiency of their operations, cut labor and operating costs, and reduce false positive volumes. The collective intelligence also allows greater enforcement of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations by helping members detect internal risks—and identify the challenges to detecting these risks in the first place. This session demonstrates how the AWS Cloud supports the MBCA to deliver advanced data analytics, provide consistent operating models across financial institutions, reduce costs, and strengthen national security.

ABD208 – Cox Automotive Empowered to Scale with Splunk Cloud & AWS and Explores New Innovation with Amazon Kinesis Firehose
In this session, learn how Cox Automotive is using Splunk Cloud for real time visibility into its AWS and hybrid environments to achieve near instantaneous MTTI, reduce auction incidents by 90%, and proactively predict outages. We also introduce a highly anticipated capability that allows you to ingest, transform, and analyze data in real time using Splunk and Amazon Kinesis Firehose to gain valuable insights from your cloud resources. It’s now quicker and easier than ever to gain access to analytics-driven infrastructure monitoring using Splunk Enterprise & Splunk Cloud.

ABD209 – Accelerating the Speed of Innovation with a Data Sciences Data & Analytics Hub at Takeda
Historically, silos of data, analytics, and processes across functions, stages of development, and geography created a barrier to R&D efficiency. Gathering the right data necessary for decision-making was challenging due to issues of accessibility, trust, and timeliness. In this session, learn how Takeda is undergoing a transformation in R&D to increase the speed-to-market of high-impact therapies to improve patient lives. The Data and Analytics Hub was built, with Deloitte, to address these issues and support the efficient generation of data insights for functions such as clinical operations, clinical development, medical affairs, portfolio management, and R&D finance. In the AWS hosted data lake, this data is processed, integrated, and made available to business end users through data visualization interfaces, and to data scientists through direct connectivity. Learn how Takeda has achieved significant time reductions—from weeks to minutes—to gather and provision data that has the potential to reduce cycle times in drug development. The hub also enables more efficient operations and alignment to achieve product goals through cross functional team accountability and collaboration due to the ability to access the same cross domain data.

ABD210 – Modernizing Amtrak: Serverless Solution for Real-Time Data Capabilities
As the nation’s only high-speed intercity passenger rail provider, Amtrak needs to know critical information to run their business such as: Who’s onboard any train at any time? How are booking and revenue trending? Amtrak was faced with unpredictable and often slow response times from existing databases, ranging from seconds to hours; existing booking and revenue dashboards were spreadsheet-based and manual; multiple copies of data were stored in different repositories, lacking integration and consistency; and operations and maintenance (O&M) costs were relatively high. Join us as we demonstrate how Deloitte and Amtrak successfully went live with a cloud-native operational database and analytical datamart for near-real-time reporting in under six months. We highlight the specific challenges and the modernization of architecture on an AWS native Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution. The solution includes cloud-native components such as AWS Lambda for microservices, Amazon Kinesis and AWS Data Pipeline for moving data, Amazon S3 for storage, Amazon DynamoDB for a managed NoSQL database service, and Amazon Redshift for near-real time reports and dashboards. Deloitte’s solution enabled “at scale” processing of 1 million transactions/day and up to 2K transactions/minute. It provided flexibility and scalability, largely eliminate the need for system management, and dramatically reduce operating costs. Moreover, it laid the groundwork for decommissioning legacy systems, anticipated to save at least $1M over 3 years.

ABD211 – Sysco Foods: A Journey from Too Much Data to Curated Insights
In this session, we detail Sysco’s journey from a company focused on hindsight-based reporting to one focused on insights and foresight. For this shift, Sysco moved from multiple data warehouses to an AWS ecosystem, including Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, AWS Data Pipeline, and more. As the team at Sysco worked with Tableau, they gained agile insight across their business. Learn how Sysco decided to use AWS, how they scaled, and how they became more strategic with the AWS ecosystem and Tableau.

ABD217 – From Batch to Streaming: How Amazon Flex Uses Real-time Analytics to Deliver Packages on Time
Reducing the time to get actionable insights from data is important to all businesses, and customers who employ batch data analytics tools are exploring the benefits of streaming analytics. Learn best practices to extend your architecture from data warehouses and databases to real-time solutions. Learn how to use Amazon Kinesis to get real-time data insights and integrate them with Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon S3. The Amazon Flex team describes how they used streaming analytics in their Amazon Flex mobile app, used by Amazon delivery drivers to deliver millions of packages each month on time. They discuss the architecture that enabled the move from a batch processing system to a real-time system, overcoming the challenges of migrating existing batch data to streaming data, and how to benefit from real-time analytics.

ABD218 – How EuroLeague Basketball Uses IoT Analytics to Engage Fans
IoT and big data have made their way out of industrial applications, general automation, and consumer goods, and are now a valuable tool for improving consumer engagement across a number of industries, including media, entertainment, and sports. The low cost and ease of implementation of AWS analytics services and AWS IoT have allowed AGT, a leader in IoT, to develop their IoTA analytics platform. Using IoTA, AGT brought a tailored solution to EuroLeague Basketball for real-time content production and fan engagement during the 2017-18 season. In this session, we take a deep dive into how this solution is architected for secure, scalable, and highly performant data collection from athletes, coaches, and fans. We also talk about how the data is transformed into insights and integrated into a content generation pipeline. Lastly, we demonstrate how this solution can be easily adapted for other industries and applications.

ABD222 – How to Confidently Unleash Data to Meet the Needs of Your Entire Organization
Where are you on the spectrum of IT leaders? Are you confident that you’re providing the technology and solutions that consistently meet or exceed the needs of your internal customers? Do your peers at the executive table see you as an innovative technology leader? Innovative IT leaders understand the value of getting data and analytics directly into the hands of decision makers, and into their own. In this session, Daren Thayne, Domo’s Chief Technology Officer, shares how innovative IT leaders are helping drive a culture change at their organizations. See how transformative it can be to have real-time access to all of the data that’ is relevant to YOUR job (including a complete view of your entire AWS environment), as well as understand how it can help you lead the way in applying that same pattern throughout your entire company

ABD303 – Developing an Insights Platform – Sysco’s Journey from Disparate Systems to Data Lake and Beyond
Sysco has nearly 200 operating companies across its multiple lines of business throughout the United States, Canada, Central/South America, and Europe. As the global leader in food services, Sysco identified the need to streamline the collection, transformation, and presentation of data produced by the distributed units and systems, into a central data ecosystem. Sysco’s Business Intelligence and Analytics team addressed these requirements by creating a data lake with scalable analytics and query engines leveraging AWS services. In this session, Sysco will outline their journey from a hindsight reporting focused company to an insights driven organization. They will cover solution architecture, challenges, and lessons learned from deploying a self-service insights platform. They will also walk through the design patterns they used and how they designed the solution to provide predictive analytics using Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Amazon S3, Amazon EMR, AWS Glue, Amazon Elasticsearch Service and other AWS services.

ABD309 – How Twilio Scaled Its Data-Driven Culture
As a leading cloud communications platform, Twilio has always been strongly data-driven. But as headcount and data volumes grew—and grew quickly—they faced many new challenges. One-off, static reports work when you’re a small startup, but how do you support a growth stage company to a successful IPO and beyond? Today, Twilio’s data team relies on AWS and Looker to provide data access to 700 colleagues. Departments have the data they need to make decisions, and cloud-based scale means they get answers fast. Data delivers real-business value at Twilio, providing a 360-degree view of their customer, product, and business. In this session, you hear firsthand stories directly from the Twilio data team and learn real-world tips for fostering a truly data-driven culture at scale.

ABD310 – How FINRA Secures Its Big Data and Data Science Platform on AWS
FINRA uses big data and data science technologies to detect fraud, market manipulation, and insider trading across US capital markets. As a financial regulator, FINRA analyzes highly sensitive data, so information security is critical. Learn how FINRA secures its Amazon S3 Data Lake and its data science platform on Amazon EMR and Amazon Redshift, while empowering data scientists with tools they need to be effective. In addition, FINRA shares AWS security best practices, covering topics such as AMI updates, micro segmentation, encryption, key management, logging, identity and access management, and compliance.

 ABD331 – Log Analytics at Expedia Using Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Expedia uses Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) for a variety of mission-critical use cases, ranging from log aggregation to application monitoring and pricing optimization. In this session, the Expedia team reviews how they use Amazon ES and Kibana to analyze and visualize Docker startup logs, AWS CloudTrail data, and application metrics. They share best practices for architecting a scalable, secure log analytics solution using Amazon ES, so you can add new data sources almost effortlessly and get insights quickly

ABD316 – American Heart Association: Finding Cures to Heart Disease Through the Power of Technology
Combining disparate datasets and making them accessible to data scientists and researchers is a prevalent challenge for many organizations, not just in healthcare research. American Heart Association (AHA) has built a data science platform using Amazon EMR, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and other AWS services, that corrals multiple datasets and enables advanced research on phenotype and genotype datasets, aimed at curing heart diseases. In this session, we present how AHA built this platform and the key challenges they addressed with the solution. We also provide a demo of the platform, and leave you with suggestions and next steps so you can build similar solutions for your use cases

ABD319 – Tooling Up for Efficiency: DIY Solutions @ Netflix
At Netflix, we have traditionally approached cloud efficiency from a human standpoint, whether it be in-person meetings with the largest service teams or manually flipping reservations. Over time, we realized that these manual processes are not scalable as the business continues to grow. Therefore, in the past year, we have focused on building out tools that allow us to make more insightful, data-driven decisions around capacity and efficiency. In this session, we discuss the DIY applications, dashboards, and processes we built to help with capacity and efficiency. We start at the ten thousand foot view to understand the unique business and cloud problems that drove us to create these products, and discuss implementation details, including the challenges encountered along the way. Tools discussed include Picsou, the successor to our AWS billing file cost analyzer; Libra, an easy-to-use reservation conversion application; and cost and efficiency dashboards that relay useful financial context to 50+ engineering teams and managers.

ABD312 – Deep Dive: Migrating Big Data Workloads to AWS
Customers are migrating their analytics, data processing (ETL), and data science workloads running on Apache Hadoop, Spark, and data warehouse appliances from on-premise deployments to AWS in order to save costs, increase availability, and improve performance. AWS offers a broad set of analytics services, including solutions for batch processing, stream processing, machine learning, data workflow orchestration, and data warehousing. This session will focus on identifying the components and workflows in your current environment; and providing the best practices to migrate these workloads to the right AWS data analytics product. We will cover services such as Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Kinesis, and more. We will also feature Vanguard, an American investment management company based in Malvern, Pennsylvania with over $4.4 trillion in assets under management. Ritesh Shah, Sr. Program Manager for Cloud Analytics Program at Vanguard, will describe how they orchestrated their migration to AWS analytics services, including Hadoop and Spark workloads to Amazon EMR. Ritesh will highlight the technical challenges they faced and overcame along the way, as well as share common recommendations and tuning tips to accelerate the time to production.

ABD402 – How Esri Optimizes Massive Image Archives for Analytics in the Cloud
Petabyte scale archives of satellites, planes, and drones imagery continue to grow exponentially. They mostly exist as semi-structured data, but they are only valuable when accessed and processed by a wide range of products for both visualization and analysis. This session provides an overview of how ArcGIS indexes and structures data so that any part of it can be quickly accessed, processed, and analyzed by reading only the minimum amount of data needed for the task. In this session, we share best practices for structuring and compressing massive datasets in Amazon S3, so it can be analyzed efficiently. We also review a number of different image formats, including GeoTIFF (used for the Public Datasets on AWS program, Landsat on AWS), cloud optimized GeoTIFF, MRF, and CRF as well as different compression approaches to show the effect on processing performance. Finally, we provide examples of how this technology has been used to help image processing and analysis for the response to Hurricane Harvey.

ABD329 – A Look Under the Hood – How Amazon.com Uses AWS Services for Analytics at Massive Scale
Amazon’s consumer business continues to grow, and so does the volume of data and the number and complexity of the analytics done in support of the business. In this session, we talk about how Amazon.com uses AWS technologies to build a scalable environment for data and analytics. We look at how Amazon is evolving the world of data warehousing with a combination of a data lake and parallel, scalable compute engines such as Amazon EMR and Amazon Redshift.

ABD327 – Migrating Your Traditional Data Warehouse to a Modern Data Lake
In this session, we discuss the latest features of Amazon Redshift and Redshift Spectrum, and take a deep dive into its architecture and inner workings. We share many of the recent availability, performance, and management enhancements and how they improve your end user experience. You also hear from 21st Century Fox, who presents a case study of their fast migration from an on-premises data warehouse to Amazon Redshift. Learn how they are expanding their data warehouse to a data lake that encompasses multiple data sources and data formats. This architecture helps them tie together siloed business units and get actionable 360-degree insights across their consumer base.

MCL202 – Ally Bank & Cognizant: Transforming Customer Experience Using Amazon Alexa
Given the increasing popularity of natural language interfaces such as Voice as User technology or conversational artificial intelligence (AI), Ally® Bank was looking to interact with customers by enabling direct transactions through conversation or voice. They also needed to develop a capability that allows third parties to connect to the bank securely for information sharing and exchange, using oAuth, an authentication protocol seen as the future of secure banking technology. Cognizant’s Architecture team partnered with Ally Bank’s Enterprise Architecture group and identified the right product for oAuth integration with Amazon Alexa and third-party technologies. In this session, we discuss how building products with conversational AI helps Ally Bank offer an innovative customer experience; increase retention through improved data-driven personalization; increase the efficiency and convenience of customer service; and gain deep insights into customer needs through data analysis and predictive analytics to offer new products and services.

MCL317 – Orchestrating Machine Learning Training for Netflix Recommendations
At Netflix, we use machine learning (ML) algorithms extensively to recommend relevant titles to our 100+ million members based on their tastes. Everything on the member home page is an evidence-driven, A/B-tested experience that we roll out backed by ML models. These models are trained using Meson, our workflow orchestration system. Meson distinguishes itself from other workflow engines by handling more sophisticated execution graphs, such as loops and parameterized fan-outs. Meson can schedule Spark jobs, Docker containers, bash scripts, gists of Scala code, and more. Meson also provides a rich visual interface for monitoring active workflows and inspecting execution logs. It has a powerful Scala DSL for authoring workflows as well as the REST API. In this session, we focus on how Meson trains recommendation ML models in production, and how we have re-architected it to scale up for a growing need of broad ETL applications within Netflix. As a driver for this change, we have had to evolve the persistence layer for Meson. We talk about how we migrated from Cassandra to Amazon RDS backed by Amazon Aurora

MCL350 – Humans vs. the Machines: How Pinterest Uses Amazon Mechanical Turk’s Worker Community to Improve Machine Learning
Ever since the term “crowdsourcing” was coined in 2006, it’s been a buzzword for technology companies and social institutions. In the technology sector, crowdsourcing is instrumental for verifying machine learning algorithms, which, in turn, improves the user’s experience. In this session, we explore how Pinterest adapted to an increased reliability on human evaluation to improve their product, with a focus on how they’ve integrated with Mechanical Turk’s platform. This presentation is aimed at engineers, analysts, program managers, and product managers who are interested in how companies rely on Mechanical Turk’s human evaluation platform to better understand content and improve machine learning algorithms. The discussion focuses on the analysis and product decisions related to building a high quality crowdsourcing system that takes advantage of Mechanical Turk’s powerful worker community.

Service sessions: architecture and best practices

Featuring Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, Amazon Kinesis, AWS Glue, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Amazon DynamoDB.

ABD201 – Big Data Architectural Patterns and Best Practices on AWS
In this session, we simplify big data processing as a data bus comprising various stages: collect, store, process, analyze, and visualize. Next, we discuss how to choose the right technology in each stage based on criteria such as data structure, query latency, cost, request rate, item size, data volume, durability, and so on. Finally, we provide reference architectures, design patterns, and best practices for assembling these technologies to solve your big data problems at the right cost

ABD202 – Best Practices for Building Serverless Big Data Applications
Serverless technologies let you build and scale applications and services rapidly without the need to provision or manage servers. In this session, we show you how to incorporate serverless concepts into your big data architectures. We explore the concepts behind and benefits of serverless architectures for big data, looking at design patterns to ingest, store, process, and visualize your data. Along the way, we explain when and how you can use serverless technologies to streamline data processing, minimize infrastructure management, and improve agility and robustness and share a reference architecture using a combination of cloud and open source technologies to solve your big data problems. Topics include: use cases and best practices for serverless big data applications; leveraging AWS technologies such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, Amazon Kinesis, AWS Lambda, Amazon Athena, and Amazon EMR; and serverless ETL, event processing, ad hoc analysis, and real-time analytics.

ABD206 – Building Visualizations and Dashboards with Amazon QuickSight
Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, a visual is worth a thousand data points.  A key aspect of our ability to gain insights from our data is to look for patterns, and these patterns are often not evident when we simply look at data in tables. The right visualization will help you gain a deeper understanding in a much quicker timeframe.  In this session, we will show you how to quickly and easily visualize your data using Amazon QuickSight.  We will show you how you can connect to data sources, generate custom metrics and calculations, create comprehensive business dashboards with various chart types, and setup filters and drill downs to slice and dice the data.

ABD203 – Real-Time Streaming Applications on AWS: Use Cases and Patterns
To win in the marketplace and provide differentiated customer experiences, businesses need to be able to use live data in real time to facilitate fast decision making. In this session, you learn common streaming data processing use cases and architectures. First, we give an overview of streaming data and AWS streaming data capabilities. Next, we look at a few customer examples and their real-time streaming applications. Finally, we walk through common architectures and design patterns of top streaming data use cases.

ABD213 – How to Build a Data Lake with AWS Glue Data Catalog
As data volumes grow and customers store more data on AWS, they often have valuable data that is not easily discoverable and available for analytics. The AWS Glue Data Catalog provides a central view of your data lake, making data readily available for analytics. We introduce key features of the AWS Glue Data Catalog and its use cases. Learn how crawlers can automatically discover your data, extract relevant metadata, and add it as table definitions to the AWS Glue Data Catalog. We will also explore the integration between AWS Glue Data Catalog and Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

ABD214 – Real-time User Insights for Mobile and Web Applications with Amazon Pinpoint
With customers demanding relevant and real-time experiences across a range of devices, digital businesses are looking to gather user data at scale, understand this data, and respond to customer needs instantly. This requires tools that can record large volumes of user data in a structured fashion, and then instantly make this data available to generate insights. In this session, we demonstrate how you can use Amazon Pinpoint to capture user data in a structured yet flexible manner. Further, we demonstrate how this data can be set up for instant consumption using services like Amazon Kinesis Firehose and Amazon Redshift. We walk through example data based on real world scenarios, to illustrate how Amazon Pinpoint lets you easily organize millions of events, record them in real-time, and store them for further analysis.

ABD223 – IT Innovators: New Technology for Leveraging Data to Enable Agility, Innovation, and Business Optimization
Companies of all sizes are looking for technology to efficiently leverage data and their existing IT investments to stay competitive and understand where to find new growth. Regardless of where companies are in their data-driven journey, they face greater demands for information by customers, prospects, partners, vendors and employees. All stakeholders inside and outside the organization want information on-demand or in “real time”, available anywhere on any device. They want to use it to optimize business outcomes without having to rely on complex software tools or human gatekeepers to relevant information. Learn how IT innovators at companies such as MasterCard, Jefferson Health, and TELUS are using Domo’s Business Cloud to help their organizations more effectively leverage data at scale.

ABD301 – Analyzing Streaming Data in Real Time with Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information. In this session, we present an end-to-end streaming data solution using Kinesis Streams for data ingestion, Kinesis Analytics for real-time processing, and Kinesis Firehose for persistence. We review in detail how to write SQL queries using streaming data and discuss best practices to optimize and monitor your Kinesis Analytics applications. Lastly, we discuss how to estimate the cost of the entire system

ABD302 – Real-Time Data Exploration and Analytics with Amazon Elasticsearch Service and Kibana
In this session, we use Apache web logs as example and show you how to build an end-to-end analytics solution. First, we cover how to configure an Amazon ES cluster and ingest data using Amazon Kinesis Firehose. We look at best practices for choosing instance types, storage options, shard counts, and index rotations based on the throughput of incoming data. Then we demonstrate how to set up a Kibana dashboard and build custom dashboard widgets. Finally, we review approaches for generating custom, ad-hoc reports.

ABD304 – Best Practices for Data Warehousing with Amazon Redshift & Redshift Spectrum
Most companies are over-run with data, yet they lack critical insights to make timely and accurate business decisions. They are missing the opportunity to combine large amounts of new, unstructured big data that resides outside their data warehouse with trusted, structured data inside their data warehouse. In this session, we take an in-depth look at how modern data warehousing blends and analyzes all your data, inside and outside your data warehouse without moving the data, to give you deeper insights to run your business. We will cover best practices on how to design optimal schemas, load data efficiently, and optimize your queries to deliver high throughput and performance.

ABD305 – Design Patterns and Best Practices for Data Analytics with Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR is one of the largest Hadoop operators in the world, enabling customers to run ETL, machine learning, real-time processing, data science, and low-latency SQL at petabyte scale. In this session, we introduce you to Amazon EMR design patterns such as using Amazon S3 instead of HDFS, taking advantage of both long and short-lived clusters, and other Amazon EMR architectural best practices. We talk about lowering cost with Auto Scaling and Spot Instances, and security best practices for encryption and fine-grained access control. Finally, we dive into some of our recent launches to keep you current on our latest features.

ABD307 – Deep Analytics for Global AWS Marketing Organization
To meet the needs of the global marketing organization, the AWS marketing analytics team built a scalable platform that allows the data science team to deliver custom econometric and machine learning models for end user self-service. To meet data security standards, we use end-to-end data encryption and different AWS services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon EMR with Apache Spark and Auto Scaling. In this session, you see real examples of how we have scaled and automated critical analysis, such as calculating the impact of marketing programs like re:Invent and prioritizing leads for our sales teams.

ABD311 – Deploying Business Analytics at Enterprise Scale with Amazon QuickSight
One of the biggest tradeoffs customers usually make when deploying BI solutions at scale is agility versus governance. Large-scale BI implementations with the right governance structure can take months to design and deploy. In this session, learn how you can avoid making this tradeoff using Amazon QuickSight. Learn how to easily deploy Amazon QuickSight to thousands of users using Active Directory and Federated SSO, while securely accessing your data sources in Amazon VPCs or on-premises. We also cover how to control access to your datasets, implement row-level security, create scheduled email reports, and audit access to your data.

ABD315 – Building Serverless ETL Pipelines with AWS Glue
Organizations need to gain insight and knowledge from a growing number of Internet of Things (IoT), APIs, clickstreams, unstructured and log data sources. However, organizations are also often limited by legacy data warehouses and ETL processes that were designed for transactional data. In this session, we introduce key ETL features of AWS Glue, cover common use cases ranging from scheduled nightly data warehouse loads to near real-time, event-driven ETL flows for your data lake. We discuss how to build scalable, efficient, and serverless ETL pipelines using AWS Glue. Additionally, Merck will share how they built an end-to-end ETL pipeline for their application release management system, and launched it in production in less than a week using AWS Glue.

ABD318 – Architecting a data lake with Amazon S3, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon Athena
Learn how to architect a data lake where different teams within your organization can publish and consume data in a self-service manner. As organizations aim to become more data-driven, data engineering teams have to build architectures that can cater to the needs of diverse users – from developers, to business analysts, to data scientists. Each of these user groups employs different tools, have different data needs and access data in different ways. In this talk, we will dive deep into assembling a data lake using Amazon S3, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and AWS Glue. The session will feature Mohit Rao, Architect and Integration lead at Atlassian, the maker of products such as JIRA, Confluence, and Stride. First, we will look at a couple of common architectures for building a data lake. Then we will show how Atlassian built a self-service data lake, where any team within the company can publish a dataset to be consumed by a broad set of users.

ABD 323 Extending Analytics Beyond the Data warehouse

Companies have valuable data that they may not be analyzing due to the complexity, scalability, and performance issues of loading the data into their data warehouse. However, with the right tools, you can extend your analytics to query data in your data lake—with no loading required. Amazon Redshift Spectrum extends the analytic power of Amazon Redshift beyond data stored in your data warehouse to run SQL queries directly against vast amounts of unstructured data in your Amazon S3 data lake. This gives you the freedom to store your data where you want, in the format you want, and have it available for analytics when you need it. Join a discussion with AWS solution architects to ask question.

ABD330 – Combining Batch and Stream Processing to Get the Best of Both Worlds
Today, many architects and developers are looking to build solutions that integrate batch and real-time data processing, and deliver the best of both approaches. Lambda architecture (not to be confused with the AWS Lambda service) is a design pattern that leverages both batch and real-time processing within a single solution to meet the latency, accuracy, and throughput requirements of big data use cases. Come join us for a discussion on how to implement Lambda architecture (batch, speed, and serving layers) and best practices for data processing, loading, and performance tuning

ABD335 – Real-Time Anomaly Detection Using Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Kinesis Analytics offers a built-in machine learning algorithm that you can use to easily detect anomalies in your VPC network traffic and improve security monitoring. Join us for an interactive discussion on how to stream your VPC flow Logs to Amazon Kinesis Streams and identify anomalies using Kinesis Analytics.

ABD339 – Deep Dive and Best Practices for Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that enables you to process data directly from Amazon S3 without the need for infrastructure. Since its launch at re:invent 2016, several organizations have adopted Athena as the central tool to process all their data. In this talk, we dive deep into the most common use cases, including working with other AWS services. We review the best practices for creating tables and partitions and performance optimizations. We also dive into how Athena handles security, authorization, and authentication. Lastly, we hear from a customer who has reduced costs and improved time to market by deploying Athena across their organization.

We look forward to meeting you at re:Invent 2017!

About the Author

Roy Ben-Alta is a solution architect and principal business development manager at Amazon Web Services in New York. He focuses on Data Analytics and ML Technologies, working with AWS customers to build innovative data-driven products.

 

AWS re:Invent 2017 Guide to All Things Containers

Post Syndicated from Nathan Taber original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-reinvent-2017-guide-to-all-things-containers/

Contributed by Tiffany Jernigan, Developer Advocate for Amazon ECS

Get ready for takeoff!

We made sure that this year’s re:Invent is chock-full of containers: there are over 40 sessions! New to containers? No problem, we have several introductory sessions for you to dip your toes. Been using containers for years and know the ins and outs? Don’t miss our technical deep-dives and interactive chalk talks led by container experts.

If you can’t make it to Las Vegas, you can catch the keynotes and session recaps from our livestream and on Twitch.

Session types

Not everyone learns the same way, so we have multiple types of breakout content:

  • Birds of a Feather
    An interactive discussion with industry leaders about containers on AWS.
  • Breakout sessions
    60-minute presentations about building on AWS. Sessions are delivered by both AWS experts and customers and span all content levels.
  • Workshops
    2.5-hour, hands-on sessions that teach how to build on AWS. AWS credits are provided. Bring a laptop, and have an active AWS account.
  • Chalk Talks
    1-hour, highly interactive sessions with a smaller audience. They begin with a short lecture delivered by an AWS expert, followed by a discussion with the audience.

Session levels

Whether you’re new to containers or you’ve been using them for years, you’ll find useful information at every level.

  • Introductory
    Sessions are focused on providing an overview of AWS services and features, with the assumption that attendees are new to the topic.
  • Advanced
    Sessions dive deeper into the selected topic. Presenters assume that the audience has some familiarity with the topic, but may or may not have direct experience implementing a similar solution.
  • Expert
    Sessions are for attendees who are deeply familiar with the topic, have implemented a solution on their own already, and are comfortable with how the technology works across multiple services, architectures, and implementations.

Session locations

All container sessions are located in the Aria Resort.

MONDAY 11/27

Breakout sessions

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON202 – Getting Started with Docker and Amazon ECS
By packaging software into standardized units, Docker gives code everything it needs to run, ensuring consistency from your laptop all the way into production. But once you have your code ready to ship, how do you run and scale it in the cloud? In this session, you become comfortable running containerized services in production using Amazon ECS. We cover container deployment, cluster management, service auto-scaling, service discovery, secrets management, logging, monitoring, security, and other core concepts. We also cover integrated AWS services and supplementary services that you can take advantage of to run and scale container-based services in the cloud.

Chalk talks

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON211 – Reducing your Compute Footprint with Containers and Amazon ECS
Tomas Riha, platform architect for Volvo, shows how Volvo transitioned its WirelessCar platform from using Amazon EC2 virtual machines to containers running on Amazon ECS, significantly reducing cost. Tomas dives deep into the architecture that Volvo used to achieve the migration in under four months, including Amazon ECS, Amazon ECR, Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS CloudFormation.

CON212 – Anomaly Detection Using Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, and Amazon EMR
Learn about the architecture that Cisco CloudLock uses to enable automated security and compliance checks throughout the entire development lifecycle, from the first line of code through runtime. It includes integration with IAM roles, Amazon VPC, and AWS KMS.

Level 400 (Expert)

CON410 – Advanced CICD with Amazon ECS Control Plane
Mohit Gupta, product and engineering lead for Clever, demonstrates how to extend the Amazon ECS control plane to optimize management of container deployments and how the control plane can be broadly applied to take advantage of new AWS services. This includes ark—an AWS CLI-based deployment to Amazon ECS, Dapple—a slack-based automation system for deployments and notifications, and Kayvee—log and event routing libraries based on Amazon Kinesis.

Workshops

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON209 – Interstella 8888: Learn How to Use Docker on AWS
Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money.  Join this workshop to get hands-on experience with Docker as you containerize Interstella 8888’s aging monolithic application and deploy it using Amazon ECS.

CON213 – Hands-on Deployment of Kubernetes on AWS
In this workshop, attendees get hands-on experience using Kubernetes and Kops (Kubernetes Operations), as described in our recent blog post. Attendees learn how to provision a cluster, assign role-based permissions and security, and launch a container. If you’re interested in learning best practices for running Kubernetes on AWS, don’t miss this workshop.

TUESDAY 11/28

Breakout Sessions

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON206 – Docker on AWS
In this session, Docker Technical Staff Member Patrick Chanezon discusses how Finnish Rail, the national train system for Finland, is using Docker on Amazon Web Services to modernize their customer facing applications, from ticket sales to reservations. Patrick also shares the state of Docker development and adoption on AWS, including explaining the opportunities and implications of efforts such as Project Moby, Docker EE, and how developers can use and contribute to Docker projects.

CON208 – Building Microservices on AWS
Increasingly, organizations are turning to microservices to help them empower autonomous teams, letting them innovate and ship software faster than ever before. But implementing a microservices architecture comes with a number of new challenges that need to be dealt with. Chief among these finding an appropriate platform to help manage a growing number of independently deployable services. In this session, Sam Newman, author of Building Microservices and a renowned expert in microservices strategy, discusses strategies for building scalable and robust microservices architectures. He also tells you how to choose the right platform for building microservices, and about common challenges and mistakes organizations make when they move to microservices architectures.

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON302 – Building a CICD Pipeline for Containers on AWS
Containers can make it easier to scale applications in the cloud, but how do you set up your CICD workflow to automatically test and deploy code to containerized apps? In this session, we explore how developers can build effective CICD workflows to manage their containerized code deployments on AWS.

Ajit Zadgaonkar, Director of Engineering and Operations at Edmunds walks through best practices for CICD architectures used by his team to deploy containers. We also deep dive into topics such as how to create an accessible CICD platform and architect for safe blue/green deployments.

CON307 – Building Effective Container Images
Sick of getting paged at 2am and wondering “where did all my disk space go?” New Docker users often start with a stock image in order to get up and running quickly, but this can cause problems as your application matures and scales. Creating efficient container images is important to maximize resources, and deliver critical security benefits.

In this session, AWS Sr. Technical Evangelist Abby Fuller covers how to create effective images to run containers in production. This includes an in-depth discussion of how Docker image layers work, things you should think about when creating your images, working with Amazon ECR, and mise-en-place for install dependencies. Prakash Janakiraman, Co-Founder and Chief Architect at Nextdoor discuss high-level and language-specific best practices for with building images and how Nextdoor uses these practices to successfully scale their containerized services with a small team.

CON309 – Containerized Machine Learning on AWS
Image recognition is a field of deep learning that uses neural networks to recognize the subject and traits for a given image. In Japan, Cookpad uses Amazon ECS to run an image recognition platform on clusters of GPU-enabled EC2 instances. In this session, hear from Cookpad about the challenges they faced building and scaling this advanced, user-friendly service to ensure high-availability and low-latency for tens of millions of users.

CON320 – Monitoring, Logging, and Debugging for Containerized Services
As containers become more embedded in the platform tools, debug tools, traces, and logs become increasingly important. Nare Hayrapetyan, Senior Software Engineer and Calvin French-Owen, Senior Technical Officer for Segment discuss the principals of monitoring and debugging containers and the tools Segment has implemented and built for logging, alerting, metric collection, and debugging of containerized services running on Amazon ECS.

Chalk Talks

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON314 – Automating Zero-Downtime Production Cluster Upgrades for Amazon ECS
Containers make it easy to deploy new code into production to update the functionality of a service, but what happens when you need to update the Amazon EC2 compute instances that your containers are running on? In this talk, we’ll deep dive into how to upgrade the Amazon EC2 infrastructure underlying a live production Amazon ECS cluster without affecting service availability. Matt Callanan, Engineering Manager at Expedia walk through Expedia’s “PRISM” project that safely relocates hundreds of tasks onto new Amazon EC2 instances with zero-downtime to applications.

CON322 – Maximizing Amazon ECS for Large-Scale Workloads
Head of Mobfox DevOps, David Spitzer, shows how Mobfox used Docker and Amazon ECS to scale the Mobfox services and development teams to achieve low-latency networking and automatic scaling. This session covers Mobfox’s ecosystem architecture. It compares 2015 and today, the challenges Mobfox faced in growing their platform, and how they overcame them.

CON323 – Microservices Architectures for the Enterprise
Salva Jung, Principle Engineer for Samsung Mobile shares how Samsung Connect is architected as microservices running on Amazon ECS to securely, stably, and efficiently handle requests from millions of mobile and IoT devices around the world.

CON324 – Windows Containers on Amazon ECS
Docker containers are commonly regarded as powerful and portable runtime environments for Linux code, but Docker also offers API and toolchain support for running Windows Servers in containers. In this talk, we discuss the various options for running windows-based applications in containers on AWS.

CON326 – Remote Sensing and Image Processing on AWS
Learn how Encirca services by DuPont Pioneer uses Amazon ECS powered by GPU-instances and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to run proprietary image-processing algorithms against satellite imagery. Mark Lanning and Ethan Harstad, engineers at DuPont Pioneer show how this architecture has allowed them to process satellite imagery multiple times a day for each agricultural field in the United States in order to identify crop health changes.

Workshops

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON317 – Advanced Container Management at Catsndogs.lol
Catsndogs.lol is a (fictional) company that needs help deploying and scaling its container-based application. During this workshop, attendees join the new DevOps team at CatsnDogs.lol, and help the company to manage their applications using Amazon ECS, and help release new features to make our customers happier than ever.Attendees get hands-on with service and container-instance auto-scaling, spot-fleet integration, container placement strategies, service discovery, secrets management with AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, time-based and event-based scheduling, and automated deployment pipelines. If you are a developer interested in learning more about how Amazon ECS can accelerate your application development and deployment workflows, or if you are a systems administrator or DevOps person interested in understanding how Amazon ECS can simplify the operational model associated with running containers at scale, then this workshop is for you. You should have basic familiarity with Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2, and IAM.

Additional requirements:

  • The AWS CLI or AWS Tools for PowerShell installed
  • An AWS account with administrative permissions (including the ability to create IAM roles and policies) created at least 24 hours in advance.

WEDNESDAY 11/29

Birds of a Feather (BoF)

CON01 – Birds of a Feather: Containers and Open Source at AWS
Cloud native architectures take advantage of on-demand delivery, global deployment, elasticity, and higher-level services to enable developer productivity and business agility. Open source is a core part of making cloud native possible for everyone. In this session, we welcome thought leaders from the CNCF, Docker, and AWS to discuss the cloud’s direction for growth and enablement of the open source community. We also discuss how AWS is integrating open source code into its container services and its contributions to open source projects.

Breakout Sessions

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON308 – Mastering Kubernetes on AWS
Much progress has been made on how to bootstrap a cluster since Kubernetes’ first commit and is now only a matter of minutes to go from zero to a running cluster on Amazon Web Services. However, evolving a simple Kubernetes architecture to be ready for production in a large enterprise can quickly become overwhelming with options for configuration and customization.

In this session, Arun Gupta, Open Source Strategist for AWS and Raffaele Di Fazio, software engineer at leading European fashion platform Zalando, show the common practices for running Kubernetes on AWS and share insights from experience in operating tens of Kubernetes clusters in production on AWS. We cover options and recommendations on how to install and manage clusters, configure high availability, perform rolling upgrades and handle disaster recovery, as well as continuous integration and deployment of applications, logging, and security.

CON310 – Moving to Containers: Building with Docker and Amazon ECS
If you’ve ever considered moving part of your application stack to containers, don’t miss this session. We cover best practices for containerizing your code, implementing automated service scaling and monitoring, and setting up automated CI/CD pipelines with fail-safe deployments. Manjeeva Silva and Thilina Gunasinghe show how McDonalds implemented their home delivery platform in four months using Docker containers and Amazon ECS to serve tens of thousands of customers.

Level 400 (Expert)

CON402 – Advanced Patterns in Microservices Implementation with Amazon ECS
Scaling a microservice-based infrastructure can be challenging in terms of both technical implementation and developer workflow. In this talk, AWS Solutions Architect Pierre Steckmeyer is joined by Will McCutchen, Architect at BuzzFeed, to discuss Amazon ECS as a platform for building a robust infrastructure for microservices. We look at the key attributes of microservice architectures and how Amazon ECS supports these requirements in production, from configuration to sophisticated workload scheduling to networking capabilities to resource optimization. We also examine what it takes to build an end-to-end platform on top of the wider AWS ecosystem, and what it’s like to migrate a large engineering organization from a monolithic approach to microservices.

CON404 – Deep Dive into Container Scheduling with Amazon ECS
As your application’s infrastructure grows and scales, well-managed container scheduling is critical to ensuring high availability and resource optimization. In this session, we deep dive into the challenges and opportunities around container scheduling, as well as the different tools available within Amazon ECS and AWS to carry out efficient container scheduling. We discuss patterns for container scheduling available with Amazon ECS, the Blox scheduling framework, and how you can customize and integrate third-party scheduler frameworks to manage container scheduling on Amazon ECS.

Chalk Talks

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON312 – Building a Selenium Fleet on the Cheap with Amazon ECS with Spot Fleet
Roberto Rivera and Matthew Wedgwood, engineers at RetailMeNot, give a practical overview of setting up a fleet of Selenium nodes running on Amazon ECS with Spot Fleet. Discuss the challenges of running Selenium with high availability at minimum cost using Amazon ECS container introspection to connect the Selenium Hub with its nodes.

CON315 – Virtually There: Building a Render Farm with Amazon ECS
Learn how 8i Corp scales its multi-tenanted, volumetric render farm up to thousands of instances using AWS, Docker, and an API-driven infrastructure. This render farm enables them to turn the video footage from an array of synchronized cameras into a photo-realistic hologram capable of playback on a range of devices, from mobile phones to high-end head mounted displays. Join Owen Evans, VP of Engineering for 8i, as they dive deep into how 8i’s rendering infrastructure is built and maintained by just a handful of people and powered by Amazon ECS.

CON325 – Developing Microservices – from Your Laptop to the Cloud
Wesley Chow, Staff Engineer at Adroll, shows how his team extends Amazon ECS by enabling local development capabilities. Hologram, Adroll’s local development program, brings the capabilities of the Amazon EC2 instance metadata service to non-EC2 hosts, so that developers can run the same software on local machines with the same credentials source as in production.

CON327 – Patterns and Considerations for Service Discovery
Roven Drabo, head of cloud operations at Kaplan Test Prep, illustrates Kaplan’s complete container automation solution using Amazon ECS along with how his team uses NGINX and HashiCorp Consul to provide an automated approach to service discovery and container provisioning.

CON328 – Building a Development Platform on Amazon ECS
Quinton Anderson, Head of Engineering for Commonwealth Bank of Australia, walks through how they migrated their internal development and deployment platform from Mesos/Marathon to Amazon ECS. The platform uses a custom DSL to abstract a layered application architecture, in a way that makes it easy to plug or replace new implementations into each layer in the stack.

Workshops

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON318 – Interstella 8888: Monolith to Microservices with Amazon ECS
Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money. Join this workshop to get hands-on experience deploying Docker containers as you break Interstella 8888’s aging monolithic application into containerized microservices. Using Amazon ECS and an Application Load Balancer, you create API-based microservices and deploy them leveraging integrations with other AWS services.

CON332 – Build a Java Spring Application on Amazon ECS
This workshop teaches you how to lift and shift existing Spring and Spring Cloud applications onto the AWS platform. Learn how to build a Spring application container, understand bootstrap secrets, push container images to Amazon ECR, and deploy the application to Amazon ECS. Then, learn how to configure the deployment for production.

THURSDAY 11/30

Breakout Sessions

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON201 – Containers on AWS – State of the Union
Just over four years after the first public release of Docker, and three years to the day after the launch of Amazon ECS, the use of containers has surged to run a significant percentage of production workloads at startups and enterprise organizations. Join Deepak Singh, General Manager of Amazon Container Services, as he covers the state of containerized application development and deployment trends, new container capabilities on AWS that are available now, options for running containerized applications on AWS, and how AWS customers successfully run container workloads in production.

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON304 – Batch Processing with Containers on AWS
Batch processing is useful to analyze large amounts of data. But configuring and scaling a cluster of virtual machines to process complex batch jobs can be difficult. In this talk, we show how to use containers on AWS for batch processing jobs that can scale quickly and cost-effectively. We also discuss AWS Batch, our fully managed batch-processing service. You also hear from GoPro and Here about how they use AWS to run batch processing jobs at scale including best practices for ensuring efficient scheduling, fine-grained monitoring, compute resource automatic scaling, and security for your batch jobs.

Level 400 (Expert)

CON406 – Architecting Container Infrastructure for Security and Compliance
While organizations gain agility and scalability when they migrate to containers and microservices, they also benefit from compliance and security, advantages that are often overlooked. In this session, Kelvin Zhu, lead software engineer at Okta, joins Mitch Beaumont, enterprise solutions architect at AWS, to discuss security best practices for containerized infrastructure. Learn how Okta built their development workflow with an emphasis on security through testing and automation. Dive deep into how containers enable automated security and compliance checks throughout the development lifecycle. Also understand best practices for implementing AWS security and secrets management services for any containerized service architecture.

Chalk Talks

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON329 – Full Software Lifecycle Management for Containers Running on Amazon ECS
Learn how The Washington Post uses Amazon ECS to run Arc Publishing, a digital journalism platform that powers The Washington Post and a growing number of major media websites. Amazon ECS enabled The Washington Post to containerize their existing microservices architecture, avoiding a complete rewrite that would have delayed the platform’s launch by several years. In this session, Jason Bartz, Technical Architect at The Washington Post, discusses the platform’s architecture. He addresses the challenges of optimizing Arc Publishing’s workload, and managing the application lifecycle to support 2,000 containers running on more than 50 Amazon ECS clusters.

CON330 – Running Containerized HIPAA Workloads on AWS
Nihar Pasala, Engineer at Aetion, discusses the Aetion Evidence Platform, a system for generating the real-world evidence used by healthcare decision makers to implement value-based care. This session discusses the architecture Aetion uses to run HIPAA workloads using containers on Amazon ECS, best practices, and learnings.

Level 400 (Expert)

CON408 – Building a Machine Learning Platform Using Containers on AWS
DeepLearni.ng develops and implements machine learning models for complex enterprise applications. In this session, Thomas Rogers, Engineer for DeepLearni.ng discusses how they worked with Scotiabank to leverage Amazon ECS, Amazon ECR, Docker, GPU-accelerated Amazon EC2 instances, and TensorFlow to develop a retail risk model that helps manage payment collections for millions of Canadian credit card customers.

Workshops

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON319 – Interstella 8888: CICD for Containers on AWS
Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money.  Join this workshop to learn how to set up a CI/CD pipeline for containerized microservices. You get hands-on experience deploying Docker container images using Amazon ECS, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline, automating everything from code check-in to production.

FRIDAY 12/1

Breakout Sessions

Level 400 (Expert)

CON405 – Moving to Amazon ECS – the Not-So-Obvious Benefits
If you ask 10 teams why they migrated to containers, you will likely get answers like ‘developer productivity’, ‘cost reduction’, and ‘faster scaling’. But teams often find there are several other ‘hidden’ benefits to using containers for their services. In this talk, Franziska Schmidt, Platform Engineer at Mapbox and Yaniv Donenfeld from AWS will discuss the obvious, and not so obvious benefits of moving to containerized architecture. These include using Docker and Amazon ECS to achieve shared libraries for dev teams, separating private infrastructure from shareable code, and making it easier for non-ops engineers to run services.

Chalk Talks

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON331 – Deploying a Regulated Payments Application on Amazon ECS
Travelex discusses how they built an FCA-compliant international payments service using a microservices architecture on AWS. This chalk talk covers the challenges of designing and operating an Amazon ECS-based PaaS in a regulated environment using a DevOps model.

Workshops

Level 400 (Expert)

CON407 – Interstella 8888: Advanced Microservice Operations
Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money. In this workshop, you help Interstella 8888 build a modern microservices-based logistics system to save the company from financial ruin. We give you the hands-on experience you need to run microservices in the real world. This includes implementing advanced container scheduling and scaling to deal with variable service requests, implementing a service mesh, issue tracing with AWS X-Ray, container and instance-level logging with Amazon CloudWatch, and load testing.

Know before you go

Want to brush up on your container knowledge before re:Invent? Here are some helpful resources to get started:

– Tiffany
@tiffanyfayj

New – Amazon EC2 Instances with Up to 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs (P3)

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-instances-with-up-to-8-nvidia-tesla-v100-gpus-p3/

Driven by customer demand and made possible by on-going advances in the state-of-the-art, we’ve come a long way since the original m1.small instance that we launched in 2006, with instances that are emphasize compute power, burstable performance, memory size, local storage, and accelerated computing.

The New P3
Today we are making the next generation of GPU-powered EC2 instances available in four AWS regions. Powered by up to eight NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, the P3 instances are designed to handle compute-intensive machine learning, deep learning, computational fluid dynamics, computational finance, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, and genomics workloads.

P3 instances use customized Intel Xeon E5-2686v4 processors running at up to 2.7 GHz. They are available in three sizes (all VPC-only and EBS-only):

ModelNVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUsGPU MemoryNVIDIA NVLinkvCPUsMain MemoryNetwork BandwidthEBS Bandwidth
p3.2xlarge116 GiBn/a861 GiBUp to 10 Gbps1.5 Gbps
p3.8xlarge464 GiB200 GBps32244 GiB10 Gbps7 Gbps
p3.16xlarge8128 GiB300 GBps64488 GiB25 Gbps14 Gbps

Each of the NVIDIA GPUs is packed with 5,120 CUDA cores and another 640 Tensor cores and can deliver up to 125 TFLOPS of mixed-precision floating point, 15.7 TFLOPS of single-precision floating point, and 7.8 TFLOPS of double-precision floating point. On the two larger sizes, the GPUs are connected together via NVIDIA NVLink 2.0 running at a total data rate of up to 300 GBps. This allows the GPUs to exchange intermediate results and other data at high speed, without having to move it through the CPU or the PCI-Express fabric.

What’s a Tensor Core?
I had not heard the term Tensor core before starting to write this post. According to this very helpful post on the NVIDIA Blog, Tensor cores are designed to speed up the training and inference of large, deep neural networks. Each core is able to quickly and efficiently multiply a pair of 4×4 half-precision (also known as FP16) matrices together, add the resulting 4×4 matrix to another half or single-precision (FP32) matrix, and store the resulting 4×4 matrix in either half or single-precision form. Here’s a diagram from NVIDIA’s blog post:

This operation is in the innermost loop of the training process for a deep neural network, and is an excellent example of how today’s NVIDIA GPU hardware is purpose-built to address a very specific market need. By the way, the mixed-precision qualifier on the Tensor core performance means that it is flexible enough to work with with a combination of 16-bit and 32-bit floating point values.

Performance in Perspective
I always like to put raw performance numbers into a real-world perspective so that they are easier to relate to and (hopefully) more meaningful. This turned out to be surprisingly difficult, given that the eight NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs on a single p3.16xlarge can do 125 trillion single-precision floating point multiplications per second.

Let’s go back to the dawn of the microprocessor era, and consider the Intel 8080A chip that powered the MITS Altair that I bought in the summer of 1977. With a 2 MHz clock, it was able to do about 832 multiplications per second (I used this data and corrected it for the faster clock speed). The p3.16xlarge is roughly 150 billion times faster. However, just 1.2 billion seconds have gone by since that summer. In other words, I can do 100x more calculations today in one second than my Altair could have done in the last 40 years!

What about the innovative 8087 math coprocessor that was an optional accessory for the IBM PC that was announced in the summer of 1981? With a 5 MHz clock and purpose-built hardware, it was able to do about 52,632 multiplications per second. 1.14 billion seconds have elapsed since then, p3.16xlarge is 2.37 billion times faster, so the poor little PC would be barely halfway through a calculation that would run for 1 second today.

Ok, how about a Cray-1? First delivered in 1976, this supercomputer was able to perform vector operations at 160 MFLOPS, making the p3.x16xlarge 781,000 times faster. It could have iterated on some interesting problem 1500 times over the years since it was introduced.

Comparisons between the P3 and today’s scale-out supercomputers are harder to make, given that you can think of the P3 as a step-and-repeat component of a supercomputer that you can launch on as as-needed basis.

Run One Today
In order to take full advantage of the NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and the Tensor cores, you will need to use CUDA 9 and cuDNN7. These drivers and libraries have already been added to the newest versions of the Windows AMIs and will be included in an updated Amazon Linux AMI that is scheduled for release on November 7th. New packages are already available in our repos if you want to to install them on your existing Amazon Linux AMI.

The newest AWS Deep Learning AMIs come preinstalled with the latest releases of Apache MxNet, Caffe2, and Tensorflow (each with support for the NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs), and will be updated to support P3 instances with other machine learning frameworks such as Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit and PyTorch as soon as these frameworks release support for the NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. You can also use the NVIDIA Volta Deep Learning AMI for NGC.

P3 instances are available in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions in On-Demand, Spot, Reserved Instance, and Dedicated Host form.

— Jeff;

 

Bringing Datacenter-Scale Hardware-Software Co-design to the Cloud with FireSim and Amazon EC2 F1 Instances

Post Syndicated from Mia Champion original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/bringing-datacenter-scale-hardware-software-co-design-to-the-cloud-with-firesim-and-amazon-ec2-f1-instances/

The recent addition of Xilinx FPGAs to AWS Cloud compute offerings is one way that AWS is enabling global growth in the areas of advanced analytics, deep learning and AI. The customized F1 servers use pooled accelerators, enabling interconnectivity of up to 8 FPGAs, each one including 64 GiB DDR4 ECC protected memory, with a dedicated PCIe x16 connection. That makes this a powerful engine with the capacity to process advanced analytical applications at scale, at a significantly faster rate. For example, AWS commercial partner Edico Genome is able to achieve an approximately 30X speedup in analyzing whole genome sequencing datasets using their DRAGEN platform powered with F1 instances.

While the availability of FPGA F1 compute on-demand provides clear accessibility and cost advantages, many mainstream users are still finding that the “threshold to entry” in developing or running FPGA-accelerated simulations is too high. Researchers at the UC Berkeley RISE Lab have developed “FireSim”, powered by Amazon FPGA F1 instances as an open-source resource, FireSim lowers that entry bar and makes it easier for everyone to leverage the power of an FPGA-accelerated compute environment. Whether you are part of a small start-up development team or working at a large datacenter scale, hardware-software co-design enables faster time-to-deployment, lower costs, and more predictable performance. We are excited to feature FireSim in this post from Sagar Karandikar and his colleagues at UC-Berkeley.

―Mia Champion, Sr. Data Scientist, AWS

Mapping an 8-node FireSim cluster simulation to Amazon EC2 F1

As traditional hardware scaling nears its end, the data centers of tomorrow are trending towards heterogeneity, employing custom hardware accelerators and increasingly high-performance interconnects. Prototyping new hardware at scale has traditionally been either extremely expensive, or very slow. In this post, I introduce FireSim, a new hardware simulation platform under development in the computer architecture research group at UC Berkeley that enables fast, scalable hardware simulation using Amazon EC2 F1 instances.

FireSim benefits both hardware and software developers working on new rack-scale systems: software developers can use the simulated nodes with new hardware features as they would use a real machine, while hardware developers have full control over the hardware being simulated and can run real software stacks while hardware is still under development. In conjunction with this post, we’re releasing the first public demo of FireSim, which lets you deploy your own 8-node simulated cluster on an F1 Instance and run benchmarks against it. This demo simulates a pre-built “vanilla” cluster, but demonstrates FireSim’s high performance and usability.

Why FireSim + F1?

FPGA-accelerated hardware simulation is by no means a new concept. However, previous attempts to use FPGAs for simulation have been fraught with usability, scalability, and cost issues. FireSim takes advantage of EC2 F1 and open-source hardware to address the traditional problems with FPGA-accelerated simulation:
Problem #1: FPGA-based simulations have traditionally been expensive, difficult to deploy, and difficult to reproduce.
FireSim uses public-cloud infrastructure like F1, which means no upfront cost to purchase and deploy FPGAs. Developers and researchers can distribute pre-built AMIs and AFIs, as in this public demo (more details later in this post), to make experiments easy to reproduce. FireSim also automates most of the work involved in deploying an FPGA simulation, essentially enabling one-click conversion from new RTL to deploying on an FPGA cluster.

Problem #2: FPGA-based simulations have traditionally been difficult (and expensive) to scale.
Because FireSim uses F1, users can scale out experiments by spinning up additional EC2 instances, rather than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on large FPGA clusters.

Problem #3: Finding open hardware to simulate has traditionally been difficult. Finding open hardware that can run real software stacks is even harder.
FireSim simulates RocketChip, an open, silicon-proven, RISC-V-based processor platform, and adds peripherals like a NIC and disk device to build up a realistic system. Processors that implement RISC-V automatically support real operating systems (such as Linux) and even support applications like Apache and Memcached. We provide a custom Buildroot-based FireSim Linux distribution that runs on our simulated nodes and includes many popular developer tools.

Problem #4: Writing hardware in traditional HDLs is time-consuming.
Both FireSim and RocketChip use the Chisel HDL, which brings modern programming paradigms to hardware description languages. Chisel greatly simplifies the process of building large, highly parameterized hardware components.

How to use FireSim for hardware/software co-design

FireSim drastically improves the process of co-designing hardware and software by acting as a push-button interface for collaboration between hardware developers and systems software developers. The following diagram describes the workflows that hardware and software developers use when working with FireSim.

Figure 2. The FireSim custom hardware development workflow.

The hardware developer’s view:

  1. Write custom RTL for your accelerator, peripheral, or processor modification in a productive language like Chisel.
  2. Run a software simulation of your hardware design in standard gate-level simulation tools for early-stage debugging.
  3. Run FireSim build scripts, which automatically build your simulation, run it through the Vivado toolchain/AWS shell scripts, and publish an AFI.
  4. Deploy your simulation on EC2 F1 using the generated simulation driver and AFI
  5. Run real software builds released by software developers to benchmark your hardware

The software developer’s view:

  1. Deploy the AMI/AFI generated by the hardware developer on an F1 instance to simulate a cluster of nodes (or scale out to many F1 nodes for larger simulated core-counts).
  2. Connect using SSH into the simulated nodes in the cluster and boot the Linux distribution included with FireSim. This distribution is easy to customize, and already supports many standard software packages.
  3. Directly prototype your software using the same exact interfaces that the software will see when deployed on the real future system you’re prototyping, with the same performance characteristics as observed from software, even at scale.

FireSim demo v1.0

Figure 3. Cluster topology simulated by FireSim demo v1.0.

This first public demo of FireSim focuses on the aforementioned “software-developer’s view” of the custom hardware development cycle. The demo simulates a cluster of 1 to 8 RocketChip-based nodes, interconnected by a functional network simulation. The simulated nodes work just like “real” machines:  they boot Linux, you can connect to them using SSH, and you can run real applications on top. The nodes can see each other (and the EC2 F1 instance on which they’re deployed) on the network and communicate with one another. While the demo currently simulates a pre-built “vanilla” cluster, the entire hardware configuration of these simulated nodes can be modified after FireSim is open-sourced.

In this post, I walk through bringing up a single-node FireSim simulation for experienced EC2 F1 users. For more detailed instructions for new users and instructions for running a larger 8-node simulation, see FireSim Demo v1.0 on Amazon EC2 F1. Both demos walk you through setting up an instance from a demo AMI/AFI and booting Linux on the simulated nodes. The full demo instructions also walk you through an example workload, running Memcached on the simulated nodes, with YCSB as a load generator to demonstrate network functionality.

Deploying the demo on F1

In this release, we provide pre-built binaries for driving simulation from the host and a pre-built AFI that contains the FPGA infrastructure necessary to simulate a RocketChip-based node.

Starting your F1 instances

First, launch an instance using the free FireSim Demo v1.0 product available on the AWS Marketplace on an f1.2xlarge instance. After your instance has booted, log in using the user name centos. On the first login, you should see the message “FireSim network config completed.” This sets up the necessary tap interfaces and bridge on the EC2 instance to enable communicating with the simulated nodes.

AMI contents

The AMI contains a variety of tools to help you run simulations and build software for RISC-V systems, including the riscv64 toolchain, a Buildroot-based Linux distribution that runs on the simulated nodes, and the simulation driver program. For more details, see the AMI Contents section on the FireSim website.

Single-node demo

First, you need to flash the FPGA with the FireSim AFI. To do so, run:

[[email protected]_ADDR ~]$ sudo fpga-load-local-image -S 0 -I agfi-00a74c2d615134b21

To start a simulation, run the following at the command line:

[[email protected]_ADDR ~]$ boot-firesim-singlenode

This automatically calls the simulation driver, telling it to load the Linux kernel image and root filesystem for the Linux distro. This produces output similar to the following:

Simulations Started. You can use the UART console of each simulated node by attaching to the following screens:

There is a screen on:

2492.fsim0      (Detached)

1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-centos.

You could connect to the simulated UART console by connecting to this screen, but instead opt to use SSH to access the node instead.

First, ping the node to make sure it has come online. This is currently required because nodes may get stuck at Linux boot if the NIC does not receive any network traffic. For more information, see Troubleshooting/Errata. The node is always assigned the IP address 192.168.1.10:

[[email protected]_ADDR ~]$ ping 192.168.1.10

This should eventually produce the following output:

PING 192.168.1.10 (192.168.1.10) 56(84) bytes of data.

From 192.168.1.1 icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable

…

64 bytes from 192.168.1.10: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=2017 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.10: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1018 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.1.10: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=19.0 ms

…

At this point, you know that the simulated node is online. You can connect to it using SSH with the user name root and password firesim. It is also convenient to make sure that your TERM variable is set correctly. In this case, the simulation expects TERM=linux, so provide that:

[[email protected]_ADDR ~]$ TERM=linux ssh [email protected]

The authenticity of host ‘192.168.1.10 (192.168.1.10)’ can’t be established.

ECDSA key fingerprint is 63:e9:66:d0:5c:06:2c:1d:5c:95:33:c8:36:92:30:49.

Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes

Warning: Permanently added ‘192.168.1.10’ (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.

[email protected]’s password:

#

At this point, you’re connected to the simulated node. Run uname -a as an example. You should see the following output, indicating that you’re connected to a RISC-V system:

# uname -a

Linux buildroot 4.12.0-rc2 #1 Fri Aug 4 03:44:55 UTC 2017 riscv64 GNU/Linux

Now you can run programs on the simulated node, as you would with a real machine. For an example workload (running YCSB against Memcached on the simulated node) or to run a larger 8-node simulation, see the full FireSim Demo v1.0 on Amazon EC2 F1 demo instructions.

Finally, when you are finished, you can shut down the simulated node by running the following command from within the simulated node:

# poweroff

You can confirm that the simulation has ended by running screen -ls, which should now report that there are no detached screens.

Future plans

At Berkeley, we’re planning to keep improving the FireSim platform to enable our own research in future data center architectures, like FireBox. The FireSim platform will eventually support more sophisticated processors, custom accelerators (such as Hwacha), network models, and peripherals, in addition to scaling to larger numbers of FPGAs. In the future, we’ll open source the entire platform, including Midas, the tool used to transform RTL into FPGA simulators, allowing users to modify any part of the hardware/software stack. Follow @firesimproject on Twitter to stay tuned to future FireSim updates.

Acknowledgements

FireSim is the joint work of many students and faculty at Berkeley: Sagar Karandikar, Donggyu Kim, Howard Mao, David Biancolin, Jack Koenig, Jonathan Bachrach, and Krste Asanović. This work is partially funded by AWS through the RISE Lab, by the Intel Science and Technology Center for Agile HW Design, and by ASPIRE Lab sponsors and affiliates Intel, Google, HPE, Huawei, NVIDIA, and SK hynix.

Predict Billboard Top 10 Hits Using RStudio, H2O and Amazon Athena

Post Syndicated from Gopal Wunnava original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/predict-billboard-top-10-hits-using-rstudio-h2o-and-amazon-athena/

Success in the popular music industry is typically measured in terms of the number of Top 10 hits artists have to their credit. The music industry is a highly competitive multi-billion dollar business, and record labels incur various costs in exchange for a percentage of the profits from sales and concert tickets.

Predicting the success of an artist’s release in the popular music industry can be difficult. One release may be extremely popular, resulting in widespread play on TV, radio and social media, while another single may turn out quite unpopular, and therefore unprofitable. Record labels need to be selective in their decision making, and predictive analytics can help them with decision making around the type of songs and artists they need to promote.

In this walkthrough, you leverage H2O.ai, Amazon Athena, and RStudio to make predictions on whether a song might make it to the Top 10 Billboard charts. You explore the GLM, GBM, and deep learning modeling techniques using H2O’s rapid, distributed and easy-to-use open source parallel processing engine. RStudio is a popular IDE, licensed either commercially or under AGPLv3, for working with R. This is ideal if you don’t want to connect to a server via SSH and use code editors such as vi to do analytics. RStudio is available in a desktop version, or a server version that allows you to access R via a web browser. RStudio’s Notebooks feature is used to demonstrate the execution of code and output. In addition, this post showcases how you can leverage Athena for query and interactive analysis during the modeling phase. A working knowledge of statistics and machine learning would be helpful to interpret the analysis being performed in this post.

Walkthrough

Your goal is to predict whether a song will make it to the Top 10 Billboard charts. For this purpose, you will be using multiple modeling techniques―namely GLM, GBM and deep learning―and choose the model that is the best fit.

This solution involves the following steps:

  • Install and configure RStudio with Athena
  • Log in to RStudio
  • Install R packages
  • Connect to Athena
  • Create a dataset
  • Create models

Install and configure RStudio with Athena

Use the following AWS CloudFormation stack to install, configure, and connect RStudio on an Amazon EC2 instance with Athena.

Launching this stack creates all required resources and prerequisites:

  • Amazon EC2 instance with Amazon Linux (minimum size of t2.large is recommended)
  • Provisioning of the EC2 instance in an existing VPC and public subnet
  • Installation of Java 8
  • Assignment of an IAM role to the EC2 instance with the required permissions for accessing Athena and Amazon S3
  • Security group allowing access to the RStudio and SSH ports from the internet (I recommend restricting access to these ports)
  • S3 staging bucket required for Athena (referenced within RStudio as ATHENABUCKET)
  • RStudio username and password
  • Setup logs in Amazon CloudWatch Logs (if needed for additional troubleshooting)
  • Amazon EC2 Systems Manager agent, which makes it easy to manage and patch

All AWS resources are created in the US-East-1 Region. To avoid cross-region data transfer fees, launch the CloudFormation stack in the same region. To check the availability of Athena in other regions, see Region Table.

Log in to RStudio

The instance security group has been automatically configured to allow incoming connections on the RStudio port 8787 from any source internet address. You can edit the security group to restrict source IP access. If you have trouble connecting, ensure that port 8787 isn’t blocked by subnet network ACLS or by your outgoing proxy/firewall.

  1. In the CloudFormation stack, choose Outputs, Value, and then open the RStudio URL. You might need to wait for a few minutes until the instance has been launched.
  2. Log in to RStudio with the and password you provided during setup.

Install R packages

Next, install the required R packages from the RStudio console. You can download the R notebook file containing just the code.

#install pacman – a handy package manager for managing installs
if("pacman" %in% rownames(installed.packages()) == FALSE)
{install.packages("pacman")}  
library(pacman)
p_load(h2o,rJava,RJDBC,awsjavasdk)
h2o.init(nthreads = -1)
##  Connection successful!
## 
## R is connected to the H2O cluster: 
##     H2O cluster uptime:         2 hours 42 minutes 
##     H2O cluster version:        3.10.4.6 
##     H2O cluster version age:    4 months and 4 days !!! 
##     H2O cluster name:           H2O_started_from_R_rstudio_hjx881 
##     H2O cluster total nodes:    1 
##     H2O cluster total memory:   3.30 GB 
##     H2O cluster total cores:    4 
##     H2O cluster allowed cores:  4 
##     H2O cluster healthy:        TRUE 
##     H2O Connection ip:          localhost 
##     H2O Connection port:        54321 
##     H2O Connection proxy:       NA 
##     H2O Internal Security:      FALSE 
##     R Version:                  R version 3.3.3 (2017-03-06)
## Warning in h2o.clusterInfo(): 
## Your H2O cluster version is too old (4 months and 4 days)!
## Please download and install the latest version from http://h2o.ai/download/
#install aws sdk if not present (pre-requisite for using Athena with an IAM role)
if (!aws_sdk_present()) {
  install_aws_sdk()
}

load_sdk()
## NULL

Connect to Athena

Next, establish a connection to Athena from RStudio, using an IAM role associated with your EC2 instance. Use ATHENABUCKET to specify the S3 staging directory.

URL <- 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/athena-downloads/drivers/AthenaJDBC41-1.0.1.jar'
fil <- basename(URL)
#download the file into current working directory
if (!file.exists(fil)) download.file(URL, fil)
#verify that the file has been downloaded successfully
list.files()
## [1] "AthenaJDBC41-1.0.1.jar"
drv <- JDBC(driverClass="com.amazonaws.athena.jdbc.AthenaDriver", fil, identifier.quote="'")

con <- jdbcConnection <- dbConnect(drv, 'jdbc:awsathena://athena.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:443/',
                                   s3_staging_dir=Sys.getenv("ATHENABUCKET"),
                                   aws_credentials_provider_class="com.amazonaws.auth.DefaultAWSCredentialsProviderChain")

Verify the connection. The results returned depend on your specific Athena setup.

con
## <JDBCConnection>
dbListTables(con)
##  [1] "gdelt"               "wikistats"           "elb_logs_raw_native"
##  [4] "twitter"             "twitter2"            "usermovieratings"   
##  [7] "eventcodes"          "events"              "billboard"          
## [10] "billboardtop10"      "elb_logs"            "gdelthist"          
## [13] "gdeltmaster"         "twitter"             "twitter3"

Create a dataset

For this analysis, you use a sample dataset combining information from Billboard and Wikipedia with Echo Nest data in the Million Songs Dataset. Upload this dataset into your own S3 bucket. The table below provides a description of the fields used in this dataset.

Field Description
yearYear that song was released
songtitleTitle of the song
artistnameName of the song artist
songidUnique identifier for the song
artistidUnique identifier for the song artist
timesignatureVariable estimating the time signature of the song
timesignature_confidenceConfidence in the estimate for the timesignature
loudnessContinuous variable indicating the average amplitude of the audio in decibels
tempoVariable indicating the estimated beats per minute of the song
tempo_confidenceConfidence in the estimate for tempo
keyVariable with twelve levels indicating the estimated key of the song (C, C#, B)
key_confidenceConfidence in the estimate for key
energyVariable that represents the overall acoustic energy of the song, using a mix of features such as loudness
pitchContinuous variable that indicates the pitch of the song
timbre_0_min thru timbre_11_minVariables that indicate the minimum values over all segments for each of the twelve values in the timbre vector
timbre_0_max thru timbre_11_maxVariables that indicate the maximum values over all segments for each of the twelve values in the timbre vector
top10Indicator for whether or not the song made it to the Top 10 of the Billboard charts (1 if it was in the top 10, and 0 if not)

Create an Athena table based on the dataset

In the Athena console, select the default database, sampled, or create a new database.

Run the following create table statement.

create external table if not exists billboard
(
year int,
songtitle string,
artistname string,
songID string,
artistID string,
timesignature int,
timesignature_confidence double,
loudness double,
tempo double,
tempo_confidence double,
key int,
key_confidence double,
energy double,
pitch double,
timbre_0_min double,
timbre_0_max double,
timbre_1_min double,
timbre_1_max double,
timbre_2_min double,
timbre_2_max double,
timbre_3_min double,
timbre_3_max double,
timbre_4_min double,
timbre_4_max double,
timbre_5_min double,
timbre_5_max double,
timbre_6_min double,
timbre_6_max double,
timbre_7_min double,
timbre_7_max double,
timbre_8_min double,
timbre_8_max double,
timbre_9_min double,
timbre_9_max double,
timbre_10_min double,
timbre_10_max double,
timbre_11_min double,
timbre_11_max double,
Top10 int
)
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
STORED AS TEXTFILE
LOCATION 's3://aws-bigdata-blog/artifacts/predict-billboard/data'
;

Inspect the table definition for the ‘billboard’ table that you have created. If you chose a database other than sampledb, replace that value with your choice.

dbGetQuery(con, "show create table sampledb.billboard")
##                                      createtab_stmt
## 1       CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE `sampledb.billboard`(
## 2                                       `year` int,
## 3                               `songtitle` string,
## 4                              `artistname` string,
## 5                                  `songid` string,
## 6                                `artistid` string,
## 7                              `timesignature` int,
## 8                `timesignature_confidence` double,
## 9                                `loudness` double,
## 10                                  `tempo` double,
## 11                       `tempo_confidence` double,
## 12                                       `key` int,
## 13                         `key_confidence` double,
## 14                                 `energy` double,
## 15                                  `pitch` double,
## 16                           `timbre_0_min` double,
## 17                           `timbre_0_max` double,
## 18                           `timbre_1_min` double,
## 19                           `timbre_1_max` double,
## 20                           `timbre_2_min` double,
## 21                           `timbre_2_max` double,
## 22                           `timbre_3_min` double,
## 23                           `timbre_3_max` double,
## 24                           `timbre_4_min` double,
## 25                           `timbre_4_max` double,
## 26                           `timbre_5_min` double,
## 27                           `timbre_5_max` double,
## 28                           `timbre_6_min` double,
## 29                           `timbre_6_max` double,
## 30                           `timbre_7_min` double,
## 31                           `timbre_7_max` double,
## 32                           `timbre_8_min` double,
## 33                           `timbre_8_max` double,
## 34                           `timbre_9_min` double,
## 35                           `timbre_9_max` double,
## 36                          `timbre_10_min` double,
## 37                          `timbre_10_max` double,
## 38                          `timbre_11_min` double,
## 39                          `timbre_11_max` double,
## 40                                     `top10` int)
## 41                             ROW FORMAT DELIMITED 
## 42                         FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' 
## 43                            STORED AS INPUTFORMAT 
## 44       'org.apache.hadoop.mapred.TextInputFormat' 
## 45                                     OUTPUTFORMAT 
## 46  'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.HiveIgnoreKeyTextOutputFormat'
## 47                                        LOCATION
## 48    's3://aws-bigdata-blog/artifacts/predict-billboard/data'
## 49                                  TBLPROPERTIES (
## 50            'transient_lastDdlTime'='1505484133')

Run a sample query

Next, run a sample query to obtain a list of all songs from Janet Jackson that made it to the Billboard Top 10 charts.

dbGetQuery(con, " SELECT songtitle,artistname,top10   FROM sampledb.billboard WHERE lower(artistname) =     'janet jackson' AND top10 = 1")
##                       songtitle    artistname top10
## 1                       Runaway Janet Jackson     1
## 2               Because Of Love Janet Jackson     1
## 3                         Again Janet Jackson     1
## 4                            If Janet Jackson     1
## 5  Love Will Never Do (Without You) Janet Jackson 1
## 6                     Black Cat Janet Jackson     1
## 7               Come Back To Me Janet Jackson     1
## 8                       Alright Janet Jackson     1
## 9                      Escapade Janet Jackson     1
## 10                Rhythm Nation Janet Jackson     1

Determine how many songs in this dataset are specifically from the year 2010.

dbGetQuery(con, " SELECT count(*)   FROM sampledb.billboard WHERE year = 2010")
##   _col0
## 1   373

The sample dataset provides certain song properties of interest that can be analyzed to gauge the impact to the song’s overall popularity. Look at one such property, timesignature, and determine the value that is the most frequent among songs in the database. Timesignature is a measure of the number of beats and the type of note involved.

Running the query directly may result in an error, as shown in the commented lines below. This error is a result of trying to retrieve a large result set over a JDBC connection, which can cause out-of-memory issues at the client level. To address this, reduce the fetch size and run again.

#t<-dbGetQuery(con, " SELECT timesignature FROM sampledb.billboard")
#Note:  Running the preceding query results in the following error: 
#Error in .jcall(rp, "I", "fetch", stride, block): java.sql.SQLException: The requested #fetchSize is more than the allowed value in Athena. Please reduce the fetchSize and try #again. Refer to the Athena documentation for valid fetchSize values.
# Use the dbSendQuery function, reduce the fetch size, and run again
r <- dbSendQuery(con, " SELECT timesignature     FROM sampledb.billboard")
dftimesignature<- fetch(r, n=-1, block=100)
dbClearResult(r)
## [1] TRUE
table(dftimesignature)
## dftimesignature
##    0    1    3    4    5    7 
##   10  143  503 6787  112   19
nrow(dftimesignature)
## [1] 7574

From the results, observe that 6787 songs have a timesignature of 4.

Next, determine the song with the highest tempo.

dbGetQuery(con, " SELECT songtitle,artistname,tempo   FROM sampledb.billboard WHERE tempo = (SELECT max(tempo) FROM sampledb.billboard) ")
##                   songtitle      artistname   tempo
## 1 Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' Michael Jackson 244.307

Create the training dataset

Your model needs to be trained such that it can learn and make accurate predictions. Split the data into training and test datasets, and create the training dataset first.  This dataset contains all observations from the year 2009 and earlier. You may face the same JDBC connection issue pointed out earlier, so this query uses a fetch size.

#BillboardTrain <- dbGetQuery(con, "SELECT * FROM sampledb.billboard WHERE year <= 2009")
#Running the preceding query results in the following error:-
#Error in .verify.JDBC.result(r, "Unable to retrieve JDBC result set for ", : Unable to retrieve #JDBC result set for SELECT * FROM sampledb.billboard WHERE year <= 2009 (Internal error)
#Follow the same approach as before to address this issue.

r <- dbSendQuery(con, "SELECT * FROM sampledb.billboard WHERE year <= 2009")
BillboardTrain <- fetch(r, n=-1, block=100)
dbClearResult(r)
## [1] TRUE
BillboardTrain[1:2,c(1:3,6:10)]
##   year           songtitle artistname timesignature
## 1 2009 The Awkward Goodbye    Athlete             3
## 2 2009        Rubik's Cube    Athlete             3
##   timesignature_confidence loudness   tempo tempo_confidence
## 1                    0.732   -6.320  89.614   0.652
## 2                    0.906   -9.541 117.742   0.542
nrow(BillboardTrain)
## [1] 7201

Create the test dataset

BillboardTest <- dbGetQuery(con, "SELECT * FROM sampledb.billboard where year = 2010")
BillboardTest[1:2,c(1:3,11:15)]
##   year              songtitle        artistname key
## 1 2010 This Is the House That Doubt Built A Day to Remember  11
## 2 2010        Sticks & Bricks A Day to Remember  10
##   key_confidence    energy pitch timbre_0_min
## 1          0.453 0.9666556 0.024        0.002
## 2          0.469 0.9847095 0.025        0.000
nrow(BillboardTest)
## [1] 373

Convert the training and test datasets into H2O dataframes

train.h2o <- as.h2o(BillboardTrain)
## 
  |                                                                       
  |                                                                 |   0%
  |                                                                       
  |=================================================================| 100%
test.h2o <- as.h2o(BillboardTest)
## 
  |                                                                       
  |                                                                 |   0%
  |                                                                       
  |=================================================================| 100%

Inspect the column names in your H2O dataframes.

colnames(train.h2o)
##  [1] "year"                     "songtitle"               
##  [3] "artistname"               "songid"                  
##  [5] "artistid"                 "timesignature"           
##  [7] "timesignature_confidence" "loudness"                
##  [9] "tempo"                    "tempo_confidence"        
## [11] "key"                      "key_confidence"          
## [13] "energy"                   "pitch"                   
## [15] "timbre_0_min"             "timbre_0_max"            
## [17] "timbre_1_min"             "timbre_1_max"            
## [19] "timbre_2_min"             "timbre_2_max"            
## [21] "timbre_3_min"             "timbre_3_max"            
## [23] "timbre_4_min"             "timbre_4_max"            
## [25] "timbre_5_min"             "timbre_5_max"            
## [27] "timbre_6_min"             "timbre_6_max"            
## [29] "timbre_7_min"             "timbre_7_max"            
## [31] "timbre_8_min"             "timbre_8_max"            
## [33] "timbre_9_min"             "timbre_9_max"            
## [35] "timbre_10_min"            "timbre_10_max"           
## [37] "timbre_11_min"            "timbre_11_max"           
## [39] "top10"

Create models

You need to designate the independent and dependent variables prior to applying your modeling algorithms. Because you’re trying to predict the ‘top10’ field, this would be your dependent variable and everything else would be independent.

Create your first model using GLM. Because GLM works best with numeric data, you create your model by dropping non-numeric variables. You only use the variables in the dataset that describe the numerical attributes of the song in the logistic regression model. You won’t use these variables:  “year”, “songtitle”, “artistname”, “songid”, or “artistid”.

y.dep <- 39
x.indep <- c(6:38)
x.indep
##  [1]  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
## [24] 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Create Model 1: All numeric variables

Create Model 1 with the training dataset, using GLM as the modeling algorithm and H2O’s built-in h2o.glm function.

modelh1 <- h2o.glm( y = y.dep, x = x.indep, training_frame = train.h2o, family = "binomial")
## 
  |                                                                       
  |                                                                 |   0%
  |                                                                       
  |=====                                                            |   8%
  |                                                                       
  |=================================================================| 100%

Measure the performance of Model 1, using H2O’s built-in performance function.

h2o.performance(model=modelh1,newdata=test.h2o)
## H2OBinomialMetrics: glm
## 
## MSE:  0.09924684
## RMSE:  0.3150347
## LogLoss:  0.3220267
## Mean Per-Class Error:  0.2380168
## AUC:  0.8431394
## Gini:  0.6862787
## R^2:  0.254663
## Null Deviance:  326.0801
## Residual Deviance:  240.2319
## AIC:  308.2319
## 
## Confusion Matrix (vertical: actual; across: predicted) for F1-optimal threshold:
##          0   1    Error     Rate
## 0      255  59 0.187898  =59/314
## 1       17  42 0.288136   =17/59
## Totals 272 101 0.203753  =76/373
## 
## Maximum Metrics: Maximum metrics at their respective thresholds
##                         metric threshold    value idx
## 1                       max f1  0.192772 0.525000 100
## 2                       max f2  0.124912 0.650510 155
## 3                 max f0point5  0.416258 0.612903  23
## 4                 max accuracy  0.416258 0.879357  23
## 5                max precision  0.813396 1.000000   0
## 6                   max recall  0.037579 1.000000 282
## 7              max specificity  0.813396 1.000000   0
## 8             max absolute_mcc  0.416258 0.455251  23
## 9   max min_per_class_accuracy  0.161402 0.738854 125
## 10 max mean_per_class_accuracy  0.124912 0.765006 155
## 
## Gains/Lift Table: Extract with `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, <data>)` or ` 
h2o.auc(h2o.performance(modelh1,test.h2o)) 
## [1] 0.8431394

The AUC metric provides insight into how well the classifier is able to separate the two classes. In this case, the value of 0.8431394 indicates that the classification is good. (A value of 0.5 indicates a worthless test, while a value of 1.0 indicates a perfect test.)

Next, inspect the coefficients of the variables in the dataset.

dfmodelh1 <- as.data.frame(h2o.varimp(modelh1))
dfmodelh1
##                       names coefficients sign
## 1              timbre_0_max  1.290938663  NEG
## 2                  loudness  1.262941934  POS
## 3                     pitch  0.616995941  NEG
## 4              timbre_1_min  0.422323735  POS
## 5              timbre_6_min  0.349016024  NEG
## 6                    energy  0.348092062  NEG
## 7             timbre_11_min  0.307331997  NEG
## 8              timbre_3_max  0.302225619  NEG
## 9             timbre_11_max  0.243632060  POS
## 10             timbre_4_min  0.224233951  POS
## 11             timbre_4_max  0.204134342  POS
## 12             timbre_5_min  0.199149324  NEG
## 13             timbre_0_min  0.195147119  POS
## 14 timesignature_confidence  0.179973904  POS
## 15         tempo_confidence  0.144242598  POS
## 16            timbre_10_max  0.137644568  POS
## 17             timbre_7_min  0.126995955  NEG
## 18            timbre_10_min  0.123851179  POS
## 19             timbre_7_max  0.100031481  NEG
## 20             timbre_2_min  0.096127636  NEG
## 21           key_confidence  0.083115820  POS
## 22             timbre_6_max  0.073712419  POS
## 23            timesignature  0.067241917  POS
## 24             timbre_8_min  0.061301881  POS
## 25             timbre_8_max  0.060041698  POS
## 26                      key  0.056158445  POS
## 27             timbre_3_min  0.050825116  POS
## 28             timbre_9_max  0.033733561  POS
## 29             timbre_2_max  0.030939072  POS
## 30             timbre_9_min  0.020708113  POS
## 31             timbre_1_max  0.014228818  NEG
## 32                    tempo  0.008199861  POS
## 33             timbre_5_max  0.004837870  POS
## 34                                    NA <NA>

Typically, songs with heavier instrumentation tend to be louder (have higher values in the variable “loudness”) and more energetic (have higher values in the variable “energy”). This knowledge is helpful for interpreting the modeling results.

You can make the following observations from the results:

  • The coefficient estimates for the confidence values associated with the time signature, key, and tempo variables are positive. This suggests that higher confidence leads to a higher predicted probability of a Top 10 hit.
  • The coefficient estimate for loudness is positive, meaning that mainstream listeners prefer louder songs with heavier instrumentation.
  • The coefficient estimate for energy is negative, meaning that mainstream listeners prefer songs that are less energetic, which are those songs with light instrumentation.

These coefficients lead to contradictory conclusions for Model 1. This could be due to multicollinearity issues. Inspect the correlation between the variables “loudness” and “energy” in the training set.

cor(train.h2o$loudness,train.h2o$energy)
## [1] 0.7399067

This number indicates that these two variables are highly correlated, and Model 1 does indeed suffer from multicollinearity. Typically, you associate a value of -1.0 to -0.5 or 1.0 to 0.5 to indicate strong correlation, and a value of 0.1 to 0.1 to indicate weak correlation. To avoid this correlation issue, omit one of these two variables and re-create the models.

You build two variations of the original model:

  • Model 2, in which you keep “energy” and omit “loudness”
  • Model 3, in which you keep “loudness” and omit “energy”

You compare these two models and choose the model with a better fit for this use case.

Create Model 2: Keep energy and omit loudness

colnames(train.h2o)
##  [1] "year"                     "songtitle"               
##  [3] "artistname"               "songid"                  
##  [5] "artistid"                 "timesignature"           
##  [7] "timesignature_confidence" "loudness"                
##  [9] "tempo"                    "tempo_confidence"        
## [11] "key"                      "key_confidence"          
## [13] "energy"                   "pitch"                   
## [15] "timbre_0_min"             "timbre_0_max"            
## [17] "timbre_1_min"             "timbre_1_max"            
## [19] "timbre_2_min"             "timbre_2_max"            
## [21] "timbre_3_min"             "timbre_3_max"            
## [23] "timbre_4_min"             "timbre_4_max"            
## [25] "timbre_5_min"             "timbre_5_max"            
## [27] "timbre_6_min"             "timbre_6_max"            
## [29] "timbre_7_min"             "timbre_7_max"            
## [31] "timbre_8_min"             "timbre_8_max"            
## [33] "timbre_9_min"             "timbre_9_max"            
## [35] "timbre_10_min"            "timbre_10_max"           
## [37] "timbre_11_min"            "timbre_11_max"           
## [39] "top10"
y.dep <- 39
x.indep <- c(6:7,9:38)
x.indep
##  [1]  6  7  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
## [24] 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38
modelh2 <- h2o.glm( y = y.dep, x = x.indep, training_frame = train.h2o, family = "binomial")
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Measure the performance of Model 2.

h2o.performance(model=modelh2,newdata=test.h2o)
## H2OBinomialMetrics: glm
## 
## MSE:  0.09922606
## RMSE:  0.3150017
## LogLoss:  0.3228213
## Mean Per-Class Error:  0.2490554
## AUC:  0.8431933
## Gini:  0.6863867
## R^2:  0.2548191
## Null Deviance:  326.0801
## Residual Deviance:  240.8247
## AIC:  306.8247
## 
## Confusion Matrix (vertical: actual; across: predicted) for F1-optimal threshold:
##          0  1    Error     Rate
## 0      280 34 0.108280  =34/314
## 1       23 36 0.389831   =23/59
## Totals 303 70 0.152815  =57/373
## 
## Maximum Metrics: Maximum metrics at their respective thresholds
##                         metric threshold    value idx
## 1                       max f1  0.254391 0.558140  69
## 2                       max f2  0.113031 0.647208 157
## 3                 max f0point5  0.413999 0.596026  22
## 4                 max accuracy  0.446250 0.876676  18
## 5                max precision  0.811739 1.000000   0
## 6                   max recall  0.037682 1.000000 283
## 7              max specificity  0.811739 1.000000   0
## 8             max absolute_mcc  0.254391 0.469060  69
## 9   max min_per_class_accuracy  0.141051 0.716561 131
## 10 max mean_per_class_accuracy  0.113031 0.761821 157
## 
## Gains/Lift Table: Extract with `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, <data>)` or `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, valid=<T/F>, xval=<T/F>)`
dfmodelh2 <- as.data.frame(h2o.varimp(modelh2))
dfmodelh2
##                       names coefficients sign
## 1                     pitch  0.700331511  NEG
## 2              timbre_1_min  0.510270513  POS
## 3              timbre_0_max  0.402059546  NEG
## 4              timbre_6_min  0.333316236  NEG
## 5             timbre_11_min  0.331647383  NEG
## 6              timbre_3_max  0.252425901  NEG
## 7             timbre_11_max  0.227500308  POS
## 8              timbre_4_max  0.210663865  POS
## 9              timbre_0_min  0.208516163  POS
## 10             timbre_5_min  0.202748055  NEG
## 11             timbre_4_min  0.197246582  POS
## 12            timbre_10_max  0.172729619  POS
## 13         tempo_confidence  0.167523934  POS
## 14 timesignature_confidence  0.167398830  POS
## 15             timbre_7_min  0.142450727  NEG
## 16             timbre_8_max  0.093377516  POS
## 17            timbre_10_min  0.090333426  POS
## 18            timesignature  0.085851625  POS
## 19             timbre_7_max  0.083948442  NEG
## 20           key_confidence  0.079657073  POS
## 21             timbre_6_max  0.076426046  POS
## 22             timbre_2_min  0.071957831  NEG
## 23             timbre_9_max  0.071393189  POS
## 24             timbre_8_min  0.070225578  POS
## 25                      key  0.061394702  POS
## 26             timbre_3_min  0.048384697  POS
## 27             timbre_1_max  0.044721121  NEG
## 28                   energy  0.039698433  POS
## 29             timbre_5_max  0.039469064  POS
## 30             timbre_2_max  0.018461133  POS
## 31                    tempo  0.013279926  POS
## 32             timbre_9_min  0.005282143  NEG
## 33                                    NA <NA>

h2o.auc(h2o.performance(modelh2,test.h2o)) 
## [1] 0.8431933

You can make the following observations:

  • The AUC metric is 0.8431933.
  • Inspecting the coefficient of the variable energy, Model 2 suggests that songs with high energy levels tend to be more popular. This is as per expectation.
  • As H2O orders variables by significance, the variable energy is not significant in this model.

You can conclude that Model 2 is not ideal for this use , as energy is not significant.

CreateModel 3: Keep loudness but omit energy

colnames(train.h2o)
##  [1] "year"                     "songtitle"               
##  [3] "artistname"               "songid"                  
##  [5] "artistid"                 "timesignature"           
##  [7] "timesignature_confidence" "loudness"                
##  [9] "tempo"                    "tempo_confidence"        
## [11] "key"                      "key_confidence"          
## [13] "energy"                   "pitch"                   
## [15] "timbre_0_min"             "timbre_0_max"            
## [17] "timbre_1_min"             "timbre_1_max"            
## [19] "timbre_2_min"             "timbre_2_max"            
## [21] "timbre_3_min"             "timbre_3_max"            
## [23] "timbre_4_min"             "timbre_4_max"            
## [25] "timbre_5_min"             "timbre_5_max"            
## [27] "timbre_6_min"             "timbre_6_max"            
## [29] "timbre_7_min"             "timbre_7_max"            
## [31] "timbre_8_min"             "timbre_8_max"            
## [33] "timbre_9_min"             "timbre_9_max"            
## [35] "timbre_10_min"            "timbre_10_max"           
## [37] "timbre_11_min"            "timbre_11_max"           
## [39] "top10"
y.dep <- 39
x.indep <- c(6:12,14:38)
x.indep
##  [1]  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
## [24] 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38
modelh3 <- h2o.glm( y = y.dep, x = x.indep, training_frame = train.h2o, family = "binomial")
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perfh3<-h2o.performance(model=modelh3,newdata=test.h2o)
perfh3
## H2OBinomialMetrics: glm
## 
## MSE:  0.0978859
## RMSE:  0.3128672
## LogLoss:  0.3178367
## Mean Per-Class Error:  0.264925
## AUC:  0.8492389
## Gini:  0.6984778
## R^2:  0.2648836
## Null Deviance:  326.0801
## Residual Deviance:  237.1062
## AIC:  303.1062
## 
## Confusion Matrix (vertical: actual; across: predicted) for F1-optimal threshold:
##          0  1    Error     Rate
## 0      286 28 0.089172  =28/314
## 1       26 33 0.440678   =26/59
## Totals 312 61 0.144772  =54/373
## 
## Maximum Metrics: Maximum metrics at their respective thresholds
##                         metric threshold    value idx
## 1                       max f1  0.273799 0.550000  60
## 2                       max f2  0.125503 0.663265 155
## 3                 max f0point5  0.435479 0.628931  24
## 4                 max accuracy  0.435479 0.882038  24
## 5                max precision  0.821606 1.000000   0
## 6                   max recall  0.038328 1.000000 280
## 7              max specificity  0.821606 1.000000   0
## 8             max absolute_mcc  0.435479 0.471426  24
## 9   max min_per_class_accuracy  0.173693 0.745763 120
## 10 max mean_per_class_accuracy  0.125503 0.775073 155
## 
## Gains/Lift Table: Extract with `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, <data>)` or `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, valid=<T/F>, xval=<T/F>)`
dfmodelh3 <- as.data.frame(h2o.varimp(modelh3))
dfmodelh3
##                       names coefficients sign
## 1              timbre_0_max 1.216621e+00  NEG
## 2                  loudness 9.780973e-01  POS
## 3                     pitch 7.249788e-01  NEG
## 4              timbre_1_min 3.891197e-01  POS
## 5              timbre_6_min 3.689193e-01  NEG
## 6             timbre_11_min 3.086673e-01  NEG
## 7              timbre_3_max 3.025593e-01  NEG
## 8             timbre_11_max 2.459081e-01  POS
## 9              timbre_4_min 2.379749e-01  POS
## 10             timbre_4_max 2.157627e-01  POS
## 11             timbre_0_min 1.859531e-01  POS
## 12             timbre_5_min 1.846128e-01  NEG
## 13 timesignature_confidence 1.729658e-01  POS
## 14             timbre_7_min 1.431871e-01  NEG
## 15            timbre_10_max 1.366703e-01  POS
## 16            timbre_10_min 1.215954e-01  POS
## 17         tempo_confidence 1.183698e-01  POS
## 18             timbre_2_min 1.019149e-01  NEG
## 19           key_confidence 9.109701e-02  POS
## 20             timbre_7_max 8.987908e-02  NEG
## 21             timbre_6_max 6.935132e-02  POS
## 22             timbre_8_max 6.878241e-02  POS
## 23            timesignature 6.120105e-02  POS
## 24                      key 5.814805e-02  POS
## 25             timbre_8_min 5.759228e-02  POS
## 26             timbre_1_max 2.930285e-02  NEG
## 27             timbre_9_max 2.843755e-02  POS
## 28             timbre_3_min 2.380245e-02  POS
## 29             timbre_2_max 1.917035e-02  POS
## 30             timbre_5_max 1.715813e-02  POS
## 31                    tempo 1.364418e-02  NEG
## 32             timbre_9_min 8.463143e-05  NEG
## 33                                    NA <NA>
h2o.sensitivity(perfh3,0.5)
## Warning in h2o.find_row_by_threshold(object, t): Could not find exact
## threshold: 0.5 for this set of metrics; using closest threshold found:
## 0.501855569251422. Run `h2o.predict` and apply your desired threshold on a
## probability column.
## [[1]]
## [1] 0.2033898
h2o.auc(perfh3)
## [1] 0.8492389

You can make the following observations:

  • The AUC metric is 0.8492389.
  • From the confusion matrix, the model correctly predicts that 33 songs will be top 10 hits (true positives). However, it has 26 false positives (songs that the model predicted would be Top 10 hits, but ended up not being Top 10 hits).
  • Loudness has a positive coefficient estimate, meaning that this model predicts that songs with heavier instrumentation tend to be more popular. This is the same conclusion from Model 2.
  • Loudness is significant in this model.

Overall, Model 3 predicts a higher number of top 10 hits with an accuracy rate that is acceptable. To choose the best fit for production runs, record labels should consider the following factors:

  • Desired model accuracy at a given threshold
  • Number of correct predictions for top10 hits
  • Tolerable number of false positives or false negatives

Next, make predictions using Model 3 on the test dataset.

predict.regh <- h2o.predict(modelh3, test.h2o)
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print(predict.regh)
##   predict        p0          p1
## 1       0 0.9654739 0.034526052
## 2       0 0.9654748 0.034525236
## 3       0 0.9635547 0.036445318
## 4       0 0.9343579 0.065642149
## 5       0 0.9978334 0.002166601
## 6       0 0.9779949 0.022005078
## 
## [373 rows x 3 columns]
predict.regh$predict
##   predict
## 1       0
## 2       0
## 3       0
## 4       0
## 5       0
## 6       0
## 
## [373 rows x 1 column]
dpr<-as.data.frame(predict.regh)
#Rename the predicted column 
colnames(dpr)[colnames(dpr) == 'predict'] <- 'predict_top10'
table(dpr$predict_top10)
## 
##   0   1 
## 312  61

The first set of output results specifies the probabilities associated with each predicted observation.  For example, observation 1 is 96.54739% likely to not be a Top 10 hit, and 3.4526052% likely to be a Top 10 hit (predict=1 indicates Top 10 hit and predict=0 indicates not a Top 10 hit).  The second set of results list the actual predictions made.  From the third set of results, this model predicts that 61 songs will be top 10 hits.

Compute the baseline accuracy, by assuming that the baseline predicts the most frequent outcome, which is that most songs are not Top 10 hits.

table(BillboardTest$top10)
## 
##   0   1 
## 314  59

Now observe that the baseline model would get 314 observations correct, and 59 wrong, for an accuracy of 314/(314+59) = 0.8418231.

It seems that Model 3, with an accuracy of 0.8552, provides you with a small improvement over the baseline model. But is this model useful for record labels?

View the two models from an investment perspective:

  • A production company is interested in investing in songs that are more likely to make it to the Top 10. The company’s objective is to minimize the risk of financial losses attributed to investing in songs that end up unpopular.
  • How many songs does Model 3 correctly predict as a Top 10 hit in 2010? Looking at the confusion matrix, you see that it predicts 33 top 10 hits correctly at an optimal threshold, which is more than half the number
  • It will be more useful to the record label if you can provide the production company with a list of songs that are highly likely to end up in the Top 10.
  • The baseline model is not useful, as it simply does not label any song as a hit.

Considering the three models built so far, you can conclude that Model 3 proves to be the best investment choice for the record label.

GBM model

H2O provides you with the ability to explore other learning models, such as GBM and deep learning. Explore building a model using the GBM technique, using the built-in h2o.gbm function.

Before you do this, you need to convert the target variable to a factor for multinomial classification techniques.

train.h2o$top10=as.factor(train.h2o$top10)
gbm.modelh <- h2o.gbm(y=y.dep, x=x.indep, training_frame = train.h2o, ntrees = 500, max_depth = 4, learn_rate = 0.01, seed = 1122,distribution="multinomial")
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perf.gbmh<-h2o.performance(gbm.modelh,test.h2o)
perf.gbmh
## H2OBinomialMetrics: gbm
## 
## MSE:  0.09860778
## RMSE:  0.3140188
## LogLoss:  0.3206876
## Mean Per-Class Error:  0.2120263
## AUC:  0.8630573
## Gini:  0.7261146
## 
## Confusion Matrix (vertical: actual; across: predicted) for F1-optimal threshold:
##          0  1    Error     Rate
## 0      266 48 0.152866  =48/314
## 1       16 43 0.271186   =16/59
## Totals 282 91 0.171582  =64/373
## 
## Maximum Metrics: Maximum metrics at their respective thresholds
##                       metric threshold    value idx
## 1                     max f1  0.189757 0.573333  90
## 2                     max f2  0.130895 0.693717 145
## 3               max f0point5  0.327346 0.598802  26
## 4               max accuracy  0.442757 0.876676  14
## 5              max precision  0.802184 1.000000   0
## 6                 max recall  0.049990 1.000000 284
## 7            max specificity  0.802184 1.000000   0
## 8           max absolute_mcc  0.169135 0.496486 104
## 9 max min_per_class_accuracy  0.169135 0.796610 104
## 10 max mean_per_class_accuracy  0.169135 0.805948 104
## 
## Gains/Lift Table: Extract with `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, <data>)` or `
h2o.sensitivity(perf.gbmh,0.5)
## Warning in h2o.find_row_by_threshold(object, t): Could not find exact
## threshold: 0.5 for this set of metrics; using closest threshold found:
## 0.501205344484314. Run `h2o.predict` and apply your desired threshold on a
## probability column.
## [[1]]
## [1] 0.1355932
h2o.auc(perf.gbmh)
## [1] 0.8630573

This model correctly predicts 43 top 10 hits, which is 10 more than the number predicted by Model 3. Moreover, the AUC metric is higher than the one obtained from Model 3.

As seen above, H2O’s API provides the ability to obtain key statistical measures required to analyze the models easily, using several built-in functions. The record label can experiment with different parameters to arrive at the model that predicts the maximum number of Top 10 hits at the desired level of accuracy and threshold.

H2O also allows you to experiment with deep learning models. Deep learning models have the ability to learn features implicitly, but can be more expensive computationally.

Now, create a deep learning model with the h2o.deeplearning function, using the same training and test datasets created before. The time taken to run this model depends on the type of EC2 instance chosen for this purpose.  For models that require more computation, consider using accelerated computing instances such as the P2 instance type.

system.time(
  dlearning.modelh <- h2o.deeplearning(y = y.dep,
                                      x = x.indep,
                                      training_frame = train.h2o,
                                      epoch = 250,
                                      hidden = c(250,250),
                                      activation = "Rectifier",
                                      seed = 1122,
                                      distribution="multinomial"
  )
)
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##    user  system elapsed 
##   1.216   0.020 166.508
perf.dl<-h2o.performance(model=dlearning.modelh,newdata=test.h2o)
perf.dl
## H2OBinomialMetrics: deeplearning
## 
## MSE:  0.1678359
## RMSE:  0.4096778
## LogLoss:  1.86509
## Mean Per-Class Error:  0.3433013
## AUC:  0.7568822
## Gini:  0.5137644
## 
## Confusion Matrix (vertical: actual; across: predicted) for F1-optimal threshold:
##          0  1    Error     Rate
## 0      290 24 0.076433  =24/314
## 1       36 23 0.610169   =36/59
## Totals 326 47 0.160858  =60/373
## 
## Maximum Metrics: Maximum metrics at their respective thresholds
##                       metric threshold    value idx
## 1                     max f1  0.826267 0.433962  46
## 2                     max f2  0.000000 0.588235 239
## 3               max f0point5  0.999929 0.511811  16
## 4               max accuracy  0.999999 0.865952  10
## 5              max precision  1.000000 1.000000   0
## 6                 max recall  0.000000 1.000000 326
## 7            max specificity  1.000000 1.000000   0
## 8           max absolute_mcc  0.999929 0.363219  16
## 9 max min_per_class_accuracy  0.000004 0.662420 145
## 10 max mean_per_class_accuracy  0.000000 0.685334 224
## 
## Gains/Lift Table: Extract with `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, <data>)` or `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, valid=<T/F>, xval=<T/F>)`
h2o.sensitivity(perf.dl,0.5)
## Warning in h2o.find_row_by_threshold(object, t): Could not find exact
## threshold: 0.5 for this set of metrics; using closest threshold found:
## 0.496293348880151. Run `h2o.predict` and apply your desired threshold on a
## probability column.
## [[1]]
## [1] 0.3898305
h2o.auc(perf.dl)
## [1] 0.7568822

The AUC metric for this model is 0.7568822, which is less than what you got from the earlier models. I recommend further experimentation using different hyper parameters, such as the learning rate, epoch or the number of hidden layers.

H2O’s built-in functions provide many key statistical measures that can help measure model performance. Here are some of these key terms.

MetricDescription
SensitivityMeasures the proportion of positives that have been correctly identified. It is also called the true positive rate, or recall.
SpecificityMeasures the proportion of negatives that have been correctly identified. It is also called the true negative rate.
ThresholdCutoff point that maximizes specificity and sensitivity. While the model may not provide the highest prediction at this point, it would not be biased towards positives or negatives.
PrecisionThe fraction of the documents retrieved that are relevant to the information needed, for example, how many of the positively classified are relevant
AUC

Provides insight into how well the classifier is able to separate the two classes. The implicit goal is to deal with situations where the sample distribution is highly skewed, with a tendency to overfit to a single class.

0.90 – 1 = excellent (A)

0.8 – 0.9 = good (B)

0.7 – 0.8 = fair (C)

.6 – 0.7 = poor (D)

0.5 – 0.5 = fail (F)

Here’s a summary of the metrics generated from H2O’s built-in functions for the three models that produced useful results.

Metric Model 3GBM ModelDeep Learning Model

Accuracy

(max)

0.882038

(t=0.435479)

0.876676

(t=0.442757)

0.865952

(t=0.999999)

Precision

(max)

1.0

(t=0.821606)

1.0

(t=0802184)

1.0

(t=1.0)

Recall

(max)

1.01.0

1.0

(t=0)

Specificity

(max)

1.01.0

1.0

(t=1)

Sensitivity

 

0.20338980.1355932

0.3898305

(t=0.5)

AUC0.84923890.86305730.756882

Note: ‘t’ denotes threshold.

Your options at this point could be narrowed down to Model 3 and the GBM model, based on the AUC and accuracy metrics observed earlier.  If the slightly lower accuracy of the GBM model is deemed acceptable, the record label can choose to go to production with the GBM model, as it can predict a higher number of Top 10 hits.  The AUC metric for the GBM model is also higher than that of Model 3.

Record labels can experiment with different learning techniques and parameters before arriving at a model that proves to be the best fit for their business. Because deep learning models can be computationally expensive, record labels can choose more powerful EC2 instances on AWS to run their experiments faster.

Conclusion

In this post, I showed how the popular music industry can use analytics to predict the type of songs that make the Top 10 Billboard charts. By running H2O’s scalable machine learning platform on AWS, data scientists can easily experiment with multiple modeling techniques and interactively query the data using Amazon Athena, without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. This helps record labels make critical decisions on the type of artists and songs to promote in a timely fashion, thereby increasing sales and revenue.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

Additional Reading

Learn how to build and explore a simple geospita simple GEOINT application using SparkR.

About the Authors

gopalGopal Wunnava is a Partner Solution Architect with the AWS GSI Team. He works with partners and customers on big data engagements, and is passionate about building analytical solutions that drive business capabilities and decision making. In his spare time, he loves all things sports and movies related and is fond of old classics like Asterix, Obelix comics and Hitchcock movies.

 

 

Bob Strahan, a Senior Consultant with AWS Professional Services, contributed to this post.

 

 

Introducing Gluon: a new library for machine learning from AWS and Microsoft

Post Syndicated from Ana Visneski original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-gluon-a-new-library-for-machine-learning-from-aws-and-microsoft/

Post by Dr. Matt Wood

Today, AWS and Microsoft announced Gluon, a new open source deep learning interface which allows developers to more easily and quickly build machine learning models, without compromising performance.

Gluon Logo

Gluon provides a clear, concise API for defining machine learning models using a collection of pre-built, optimized neural network components. Developers who are new to machine learning will find this interface more familiar to traditional code, since machine learning models can be defined and manipulated just like any other data structure. More seasoned data scientists and researchers will value the ability to build prototypes quickly and utilize dynamic neural network graphs for entirely new model architectures, all without sacrificing training speed.

Gluon is available in Apache MXNet today, a forthcoming Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit release, and in more frameworks over time.

Neural Networks vs Developers
Machine learning with neural networks (including ‘deep learning’) has three main components: data for training; a neural network model, and an algorithm which trains the neural network. You can think of the neural network in a similar way to a directed graph; it has a series of inputs (which represent the data), which connect to a series of outputs (the prediction), through a series of connected layers and weights. During training, the algorithm adjusts the weights in the network based on the error in the network output. This is the process by which the network learns; it is a memory and compute intensive process which can take days.

Deep learning frameworks such as Caffe2, Cognitive Toolkit, TensorFlow, and Apache MXNet are, in part, an answer to the question ‘how can we speed this process up? Just like query optimizers in databases, the more a training engine knows about the network and the algorithm, the more optimizations it can make to the training process (for example, it can infer what needs to be re-computed on the graph based on what else has changed, and skip the unaffected weights to speed things up). These frameworks also provide parallelization to distribute the computation process, and reduce the overall training time.

However, in order to achieve these optimizations, most frameworks require the developer to do some extra work: specifically, by providing a formal definition of the network graph, up-front, and then ‘freezing’ the graph, and just adjusting the weights.

The network definition, which can be large and complex with millions of connections, usually has to be constructed by hand. Not only are deep learning networks unwieldy, but they can be difficult to debug and it’s hard to re-use the code between projects.

The result of this complexity can be difficult for beginners and is a time-consuming task for more experienced researchers. At AWS, we’ve been experimenting with some ideas in MXNet around new, flexible, more approachable ways to define and train neural networks. Microsoft is also a contributor to the open source MXNet project, and were interested in some of these same ideas. Based on this, we got talking, and found we had a similar vision: to use these techniques to reduce the complexity of machine learning, making it accessible to more developers.

Enter Gluon: dynamic graphs, rapid iteration, scalable training
Gluon introduces four key innovations.

  1. Friendly API: Gluon networks can be defined using a simple, clear, concise code – this is easier for developers to learn, and much easier to understand than some of the more arcane and formal ways of defining networks and their associated weighted scoring functions.
  2. Dynamic networks: the network definition in Gluon is dynamic: it can bend and flex just like any other data structure. This is in contrast to the more common, formal, symbolic definition of a network which the deep learning framework has to effectively carve into stone in order to be able to effectively optimizing computation during training. Dynamic networks are easier to manage, and with Gluon, developers can easily ‘hybridize’ between these fast symbolic representations and the more friendly, dynamic ‘imperative’ definitions of the network and algorithms.
  3. The algorithm can define the network: the model and the training algorithm are brought much closer together. Instead of separate definitions, the algorithm can adjust the network dynamically during definition and training. Not only does this mean that developers can use standard programming loops, and conditionals to create these networks, but researchers can now define even more sophisticated algorithms and models which were not possible before. They are all easier to create, change, and debug.
  4. High performance operators for training: which makes it possible to have a friendly, concise API and dynamic graphs, without sacrificing training speed. This is a huge step forward in machine learning. Some frameworks bring a friendly API or dynamic graphs to deep learning, but these previous methods all incur a cost in terms of training speed. As with other areas of software, abstraction can slow down computation since it needs to be negotiated and interpreted at run time. Gluon can efficiently blend together a concise API with the formal definition under the hood, without the developer having to know about the specific details or to accommodate the compiler optimizations manually.

The team here at AWS, and our collaborators at Microsoft, couldn’t be more excited to bring these improvements to developers through Gluon. We’re already seeing quite a bit of excitement from developers and researchers alike.

Getting started with Gluon
Gluon is available today in Apache MXNet, with support coming for the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit in a future release. We’re also publishing the front-end interface and the low-level API specifications so it can be included in other frameworks in the fullness of time.

You can get started with Gluon today. Fire up the AWS Deep Learning AMI with a single click and jump into one of 50 fully worked, notebook examples. If you’re a contributor to a machine learning framework, check out the interface specs on GitHub.

-Dr. Matt Wood

New Techniques in Fake Reviews

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/09/new_techniques_.html

Research paper: “Automated Crowdturfing Attacks and Defenses in Online Review Systems.”

Abstract: Malicious crowdsourcing forums are gaining traction as sources of spreading misinformation online, but are limited by the costs of hiring and managing human workers. In this paper, we identify a new class of attacks that leverage deep learning language models (Recurrent Neural Networks or RNNs) to automate the generation of fake online reviews for products and services. Not only are these attacks cheap and therefore more scalable, but they can control rate of content output to eliminate the signature burstiness that makes crowdsourced campaigns easy to detect.

Using Yelp reviews as an example platform, we show how a two phased review generation and customization attack can produce reviews that are indistinguishable by state-of-the-art statistical detectors. We conduct a survey-based user study to show these reviews not only evade human detection, but also score high on “usefulness” metrics by users. Finally, we develop novel automated defenses against these attacks, by leveraging the lossy transformation introduced by the RNN training and generation cycle. We consider countermeasures against our mechanisms, show that they produce unattractive cost-benefit tradeoffs for attackers, and that they can be further curtailed by simple constraints imposed by online service providers.