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TensorFlow: A system for large-scale machine learning (arxiv.org)
2 points by drewvolpe on May 31, 2016 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: TensorFlow lays out a machine learning job as a graph of math steps and shared values, then spreads it across computers and chips. Unlike older systems that hard-wire how shared values are managed, it lets developers try their own training tricks while running fast.

Abstract

TensorFlow is a machine learning system that operates at large scale and in heterogeneous environments. TensorFlow uses dataflow graphs to represent computation, shared state, and the operations that mutate that state. It maps the nodes of a dataflow graph across many machines in a cluster, and within a machine across multiple computational devices, including multicore CPUs, general-purpose GPUs, and custom designed ASICs known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). This architecture gives flexibility to the application developer: whereas in previous "parameter server" designs the management of shared state is built into the system, TensorFlow enables developers to experiment with novel optimizations and training algorithms. TensorFlow supports a variety of applications, with particularly strong support for training and inference on deep neural networks. Several Google services use TensorFlow in production, we have released it as an open-source project, and it has become widely used for machine learning research. In this paper, we describe the TensorFlow dataflow model in contrast to existing systems, and demonstrate the compelling performance that TensorFlow achieves for several real-world applications.

Martín Abadi, Paul Barham, Jianmin Chen, Zhifeng Chen, Andy Davis, Jeffrey Dean, Matthieu Devin, Sanjay Ghemawat, Geoffrey Irving, Michael Isard, Manjunath Kudlur, Josh Levenberg, et al.
arXiv:1605.08695 · cs.DC, cs.AI · submitted May 27, 2016 · updated May 31, 2016
abstract · pdf · html · 18 pages, 9 figures; v2 has a spelling correction in the metadata

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