TensorFlow is a very powerful numerical computing framework. However, like any large research level program it can be challenging to install and configure. In this post I’ll try to give some guidance on relatively easy ways to get started with TensorFlow. I’ll only look at relatively simple “CPU only” Installs with “standard” Python and Anaconda Python in this post. (I also have a quick test with Intel Python.)
TensorFlow is on it’s way to becoming the “standard” framework for machine learning. There are many reasons for that, and, it is not just for machine learning! In this post I’ll give a descriptive introduction to TensorFlow. This is the first post in a series on how to work with TensorFlow. Hopefully after reading thsi you will have a better understanding of the What? and Why? of TensorFlow.
This post will look at the molecular dynamics program, NAMD. NAMD has good GPU acceleration but is heavily dependent on CPU performance as well. It achieves best performance when there is a proper balance between CPU and GPU. The system under test has 2 Xeon 8180 28-core CPU’s. That’s the current top of the line Intel processor. We’ll see how many GPU’s we can add to those Xeon 8180 CPU’s to get optimal CPU/GPU compute balance with NAMD.
In this post I present some Multi-GPU scaling tests running TensorFlow on a very nice system with 8 1080Ti GPU’s. I use the Docker Workstation setup that I have recently written about. The job I ran for this testing was the “Billion Words Benchmark” using an LSTM model. Results were very good and better than expected.
The Intel CPU flaw and the Meltdown and Spectre security exploits are causing a lot of concern. There is a possibility of application slowdown from the kernel patches to mitigate the exploits. This slowdown concern is a concern for GPU accelerated application because of the systems calls they require for moving data between CPU and GPU memory space. I did some testing on a couple of large Tensorflow and Caffe machine learning jobs along with the creation of a LMDA database from 1.3 million images.
In this post I’ll be working up, analyzing, visualizing, and doing Gradient Descent for Linear Regression. It’s a Jupyter notebook with all the code for plots and functions in Python available on my github account.
In Part 3 of this series on Linear Regression I will go into more detail about the Model and Cost function. Including several graphs that will hopefully give insight into the their nature and serve as a reference for developing algorithms in the next post.
In Part 2 of this series on Linear Regression I will pull a data-set of house sale prices and “features” from Kaggle and explore the data in a Jupyter notebook with pandas and seaborn. We will extract a good subset of data to use for our example analysis of the linear regression algorithms.
Linear regression could possibly be considered the “Hello World” problem of Machine Learning. It’s implementation touches on many of the fundamental ideas and problems in this field. I’ll give you some guidance for understanding and implementation of this fundamental idea.
This is the start of a series of posts on Machine Learning and Data Science. I’ll be exploring the algorithms and tools of Machine Learning and Data Science. It will be tutorials, guides, how-to, reviews and “real world” application. The post will be done using Juypter notebooks and the notebooks will be available on GitHub.
Puget Systems builds custom workstations, servers and storage solutions tailored for your work.
We provide:
Extensive performance testing
making you more productive and giving better value for your money
Reliable computers
with fewer crashes means more time working & less time waiting
Support that understands
your complex workflows and can get you back up & running ASAP
A proven track record
as shown by our case studies and customer testimonials
