Month: August 2021

New research creates a deployable AI framework for detecting gravitational waves within massive amounts of data at several magnitudes faster than real time.

Scientists searching the universe for gravitational waves just got a boost thanks to a new study and AI.

The research, recently published in Nature Astronomy, creates a deployable AI framework for detecting gravitational waves within massive amounts of data—at several magnitudes faster than real time.

Created by a group of scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NVIDIA, and IBM, the work highlights how AI and supercomputing can accelerate reproducible, data-driven discoveries.

“As a computer scientist, what’s exciting to me about this project is that it shows how, with the right tools, AI methods can be integrated naturally into the workflows of scientists. Allowing them to do their work faster and better. Augmenting, not replacing, human intelligence,” study senior author Ian Foster, director of Argonne’s Data Science and Learning division said in a press release.

In 2015, the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) first detected gravitational waves when two black holes, 1.3 billion light-years away, collided and merged. 

These waves occur when massive objects quickly accelerate (such as a star exploding or massive objects colliding) creating a ripple through space time.

The notable discovery confirmed part of Einstein’s theory of relativity, hypothesizing that space and time are linked. It also marked the start of gravitational wave astronomy, which could result in a deeper understanding of the cosmos, including dark energy, gravity, and neutron stars. 

It also holds potential for scientists to step back through time to the moments around the Big Bang.

Since 2015, many more gravitational wave sources have been detected from LIGO. As the observatory continues with sensor upgrades and refinements, the expanse of detectors within the universe will also grow, creating large amounts of data for processing. Quickly computing these data streams remains key to gravitational wave astronomy advancements and discoveries.

In 2018 Eliu Huerta, lead for Translational AI and Computational Ccience at Argonne, demonstrated the capability of machine learning to detect gravitational waves from multiple LIGO detector data streams.  

In this study, the researchers further refined the model, which uses the cuDNN-accelerated deep learning framework distributed over 64 NVIDIA GPUs. They tested the model against LIGO data from 2017 and found it accurately identified four binary black hole mergers—without any misclassifications. It also processed a month’s worth of data in under 7 minutes. 

“In this study, we’ve used the combined power of AI and supercomputing to help solve timely and relevant big-data experiments. We are now making AI studies fully reproducible, not merely ascertaining whether AI may provide a novel solution to grand challenges,” Huerta said.

The team’s models are open-source and readily available. 

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Read the full article in Nature Astronomy >>
Read more >>  

 

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Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly used to make decisions across many domains like healthcare, education, and financial services. Since ML models are being used in situations that have a real impact on people, it is critical to understand what features are being considered for the decisions to eliminate or minimize the impact of biases. Model … Continued

Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly used to make decisions across many domains like healthcare, education, and financial services. Since ML models are being used in situations that have a real impact on people, it is critical to understand what features are being considered for the decisions to eliminate or minimize the impact of biases.

Model Interpretability aids developers and other stakeholders to understand model characteristics and the underlying reasons for the decisions, thus making the process more transparent. Being able to interpret models can help data scientists explain the reasons for decisions made by their models, adding value and trust to the model. In this post, we discuss:

• The Need for Model Interpretability
• Interpretability using SHAP
• GPU-accelerated SHAP implementation from RAPIDS
• Using SHAP for model explanation on Azure Machine Learning with a demo notebook.

Why do we need Interpretability?

There are six main reasons that justify the need for model interoperability in machine learning:

• Understanding fairness issues in the model
• Precise understanding of the objectives
• Creating robust models
• Debugging models
• Explaining outcomes
• Enabling auditing

Understanding fairness issues in the model: An interpretable model can explain the reasons for choosing the outcome. In social contexts, these explanations will inevitably reveal inherent biases towards underrepresented groups. The first step to overcoming these biases is to see how they manifest.

A more precise understanding of the objectives: The need for explanations also arises from our gaps in understanding the problem fully. Explanations are one of the ways to ensure that the effects of the gaps are visible to us. It helps in understanding whether the models’ predictions are matching the stakeholders’ or experts’ objectives.

Creating Robust Models: Interpretable models can help us understand why there’s some variance in the predictions, which can help make them more robust and eliminate extreme and unintended changes in forecasts; and why the errors were made. Increasing robustness can also help build trust in the model as it doesn’t produce dramatically different results.

Model interpretability can also help debug models, explain outcomes to stakeholders, and enable auditing to meet regulatory compliances.

It is important to note that there are instances where interpretability might be less important. For example, there might be cases where adding interpretable models can aid adversaries to cheat the systems.

Now that we understand what interpretability is and why we need it, let’s look at one way of implementing it that has become very popular recently.

Interpretability using SHAP and cuML’s SHAP

There are different methods that aim at improving model interpretability; one such model-agnostic method is SHAPley Values. It’s a method derived from coalitional game theory to provide a way to distribute the “payout” across the features fairly. In the case of Machine Learning models, the payout is the predictions/outcome of the models. It works by computing the Shapley Values for the whole dataset and combining them.

cuML, the Machine Learning library in RAPIDS that supports single and multi-GPU Machine Learning algorithms, provides GPU-accelerated Model Explainability through Kernel Explainer and Permutation Explainer. Kernel SHAP is the most versatile and commonly used black box explainer of SHAP. It uses weighted linear regression to estimate the SHAP values, making it a computationally efficient method to approximate the values.

The cuML implementation of Kernel SHAP provides acceleration to fast GPU models, like those in cuML. They can also be used with CPU-based models, where speedups can still be achieved but they might be limited due to data transfers and the speed of models themselves.

In the next section, we will discuss how to use RAPIDS Kernel SHAP on Azure.

Using interpret-community and RAPIDS for Interpretability

InterpretML is an open-source package that incorporates state-of-the-art machine learning interpretability techniques under one roof. While the main interpretability techniques and glass box explainable models are covered in the Interpret package of this offering, Interpret-Community extends the Interpret repository and incorporates further community developed and experimental interpretability techniques and functionalities that are designed to enable interpretability for real-world scenarios.

We can extend this to explain models on Microsoft Azure, which is discussed in more detail later. Interpret-community provides various techniques for interpreting models, including:

• Tree, Deep, Linear, and Kernel Explainers based on SHAP, 
• Mimic Explainer based on training global surrogate models (trains a model to approximate the predictions of the black box model), and 
• Permutation Feature Importance(PFI) Explainer based on Breiman’s paper on Rander Forest, which works by shuffling data one feature at a time for the entire dataset and estimating how it affects the performance metric; the larger the change, the more important the feature is. It can explain the overall behavior and not the individual predictions.

Integrating GPU accelerated SHAP in interpret-community

To make GPU-accelerated SHAP easily accessible to end-users, we integrated the cuML’s GPU KernelExplainer to the interpret-community package. Users who have access to VMs with GPUs on Azure (NVIDIA Pascal or better) can install RAPIDS (>=0.20) and enable the GPU explainer by setting the use_gpu flag to True.

from interpret.ext.blackbox import TabularExplainer

# "features" and "classes" fields are optional
explainer = TabularExplainer(model,
                          x_train,
                          features=breast_cancer_data.feature_names,
                          classes=classes,
use_gpu=True)

The newly added GPUKernelExplainer also uses cuML K-Means to replicate the behavior of shap.kmeans. KMeans reduces the size of background data to be processed by the explainers. It summarizes the dataset passed with K mean samples weighted by the number of data points. Replacing sklearn K-Means with cuML allows us to leverage the speed-ups of GPU even during preprocessing of the data before SHAP.

Based on our experiments, we found that cuML models, when used with cuML KernelExplainer, produce the most optimal results for speeds noticing up to 270x speed-ups in some cases. We also saw the best speed-ups for models with optimized and fast predict calls, as seen with the optimized sklearn.svm.LinearSVR and cuml.svm.SVR(kernel=’linear’). 

Model explanations in Azure 

Azure Machine Learning provides a way to get explanations for regular and automated ML training through the azureml-interpret SDK package. It enables the user to achieve model interpretability on real-world datasets at scale during training and inference[2]. We can also use interactive visualizations to further explore overall and individual model predictions and understand our model and dataset further.  Azure-interpret uses the techniques in the interpret-community package, which means it now supports RAPIDS SHAP. We’ll walk through an example notebook demonstrating Model Interpretability using cuML’s SHAP on Azure.

• Set up a RAPIDS environment using a Custom Docker Image on GPU VM (Standard_NC6s_v3, in this example). 

View this code snippet on GitHub.

• We’ve provided a script(train_explain.py), which trains and explains a binary classification problem using the cuML SVM model. In this example, we are using the HIGGS Dataset to predict if a process generates Higgs Bosons or not. It has 21 kinematic properties measured by particle detectors in the accelerator.

• The script then generates model explanations with GPU SHAP KernelExplainer. 

• The generated explanations are uploaded to Azure Machine Learning using our ExplanationClient, which is the client that uploads and downloads the explanations. This can run locally on your machine or remotely on Azure Machine Learning Compute.

View this code snippet on GitHub.

• Once the generated explanations are uploaded to Azure Machine Learning Run History, you can view the visualization on the explanations dashboard in Azure Machine Learning Studio.

We benchmarked the CPU and GPU implementation on a single explain_global call in Azure. The explain_global function returns the aggregate feature importance values as opposed to instance-level feature importance values while using explain_local. We are comparing cuml.svm.SVR(kernel=’rbf’) vs sklearn.svm.SVR(kernel=’rbf’) on synthetic data with shape (10000, 40).

As we can observe from Table 1, when we use the GPU VM (Standard_NC6S_v3), there’s a 420x speed-up on 2000 rows of explanation as opposed to a CPU VM with 16 cores (Standard_DS5_v2). We did notice that using a 64-core CPU VM(Standard_D64S_v3) over a 16-core CPU VM yielded a faster CPU runtime (by the order of around 1.3x). This faster CPU run was still much slower than the GPU run and more expensive. GPU run was 380x faster with a cost of $0.52 in comparison to a $23 for the 64 core CPU VM. We ran the experiments in the US East region in Azure.

From our experiments, using cuML’s KernelExplainer proves to be more cost and time-efficient on Azure. The speed-ups are better as the number of rows increases. Not only does GPU SHAP explain more data but it also saves more money and time. This can hugely impact businesses that are time-sensitive.

A simple example of how you can use cuML’s SHAP for explanations on Azure. This can be extended to larger examples with more interesting models and datasets. The libraries discussed in this post are constantly updated, if you’re interested in adding or requesting new features check out the following resources:

• https://github.com/rapidsai/cuml
• https://github.com/interpretml/interpret-community
• https://github.com/rapidsai/cloud-ml-examples
• Interpret and explain ML models in Python (preview) – Azure Machine Learning | Microsoft Docs.

References

• Towards A Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning – Doshi-Velezand Been Kim
• Model interpretability in Azure Machine Learning (preview)

Ray Tracing Games II is now available to download for free via Apress and Amazon. This Open Access book is a must-have for anyone interested in real-time rendering. Ray tracing is the holy grail of gaming graphics, simulating the physical behavior of light to bring real-time, cinematic-quality rendering to even the most visually intense games.

Ray Tracing Games II is now available to download for free via Apress.

This Open Access book is a must-have for anyone interested in real-time rendering. Ray tracing is the holy grail of gaming graphics, simulating the physical behavior of light to bring real-time, cinematic-quality rendering to even the most visually intense games. Ray tracing is also a fundamental algorithm used for architecture applications, visualization, sound simulation, deep learning, and more.

To win a limited edition print copy of Ray Tracing Gems II, enter the giveaway contest here: https://developer.nvidia.com/ray-tracing-gems-ii

A message from the editors:

In 2018, real-time ray tracing arrived in consumer GPU hardware and swiftly established itself as a key component of how images would be generated moving forward. Now, three years later, the second iteration of this hardware is available, mainstream game consoles support ray tracing, and cross-platform API standards have been established to drive even wider adoption. Developers and researchers have been busy inventing (and reinventing) algorithms to take advantage of the new possibilities created by these advancements. The “gems” of knowledge discovered during this process are what you will find in Ray Tracing Gems II.

Before diving into the treasure trove, we want to make sure you know the following:

• Supplementary code and other materials related to this book can be found at https://github.com/Apress/Ray-Tracing-Gems-II.
• All content in this book is open access.

Open access content allows you to freely copy and redistribute any chapter, or the whole book, as long as you give appropriate credit and you are not using it for commercial purposes. The specific license is the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND). We put this in place so that authors, and everyone else, can disseminate the information in this volume as quickly, widely, and equitably as possible.

Writing an anthology style book, such as this, is an act of collective faith. Faith that the authors, editors, publisher, and schedules all converge to produce a worthwhile result for readers. Under normal circumstances this is a difficult task, but the past year and a half has been anything but “normal”. This book’s call for participation was posted in late November 2019, just as the COVID-19 virus began to emerge in Asia. In the 18 months since, a once-in-a-century pandemic has surged. Its impact has touched every person on Earth – and it is not yet over. The virus has taken lives, battered livelihoods, and broken the way of life as we knew it. We postponed this book with the quiet conviction that the coronavirus would be overcome. As time passed, the development of vaccines made breakneck progress, remote work in quarantine became a new staple of life, and authors began to write about computer graphics again. As a result, this book was written entirely during quarantine. We sincerely thank the authors for their passion and dedication – and faith – all of which made this book possible under extraordinary circumstances.

     – Adam Marrs, Peter Shirley, and Ingo Wald

Sustainability isn’t just a choice for consumers to make. It’s an opportunity for companies to lead. AI startup Heartdub seams together fashion and technology to let designers and creators display physical fabrics and garments virtually — and help clothing companies achieve zero-waste manufacturing. The company’s software digitizes textiles and then simulates how clothes look on Read article >

The post Zero Waste with Taste: Startup Uses AI to Drive Sustainable Fashion appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

A new generation of AI applications at the edge is driving incredible operational efficiency and safety gains across a broad range of spaces. Read how the power of AI and edge computing is critical to building smarter and safer spaces.

In an increasingly complex world, the need to automate and improve operational efficiency and safety in our physical spaces has never been greater. Whether it is streamlining the retail experience, tackling traffic congestion in our growing cities, or improving productivity in our factories—the power of AI and edge computing is critical. 

Video cameras are one of the most important IoT sensors. With approximately 1 billion cameras deployed worldwide, they generate a wealth of data that, when combined with AI-enabled perception and reasoning, is key to transforming ordinary areas into smart spaces. 

As the number of IoT sensors grows, more data is getting generated in remote edge locations. Sending data from sensors at the edge to data centers is extremely costly. However, data movement is critical for the successful operation of AI applications, which means that these applications are susceptible to high costs and latency when processing through the cloud. Sending the data to data centers is not ideal in contexts where every second counts, such as managing real-time traffic or addressing medical emergencies.

This leads us to edge computing, a distributed computing model that allows computing to take place near the sensor where data is being collected and analyzed.

Edge computing is the technology that powers edge AI, an architecture that processes the sensor data with deep learning algorithms close to the sensors generating the data. Edge AI enables any device or computer to process data and make decisions in real-time with minimal latency. Hence, edge computing is essential for real-time applications that require low latency to enable quick responses. Examples include spotting obstacles on rail lines, inspecting defects on fast moving assembly lines, or detecting patient falls in hospitals.

By bringing AI processing tasks closer to the source, edge computing overcomes issues that can occur with cloud computing, like high latency and compromised security. Some advantages of edge computing are:

• Reduced latency: Bringing AI and computing power to where data is generated, rather than collecting and uploading data to a data center, minimizing latency. This responsiveness is critical for the successful execution of real-time applications.
• Improved security: Allowing data to be processed locally reduces the need to send sensitive data over networks. With edge computing, data doesn’t need to leave the sensor, making it possible for the data to remain private. 
• Minimized expenses: Moving AI processing to the edge is cost efficient. Entities only need to send highly valuable data to the data center and process everything else locally—saving on costs associated with bandwidth and data storage. 
• Enhanced range: Processing data without needing internet access enables applications to run in previously inaccessible, remote locations.

Use Cases of Edge Computing for Smart Cities

Cities, school campuses, and shopping malls are several of many places that have started to use AI at the edge to transform themselves into smart spaces. From traffic management to city planning, these entities are using AI to make their spaces more efficient, accessible, and safe. 

The following examples illustrate how edge computing has been used to transform operations and improve safety around the world. 

To reduce traffic congestion
Nota developed a real-time traffic control solution that uses edge computing and computer vision to identify traffic volume, analyze congestion, and optimize traffic signal controls at intersections. Nota’s solutions are used by cities to improve traffic flow, saving them traffic congestion-related costs and minimizing the amount of time drivers spend in traffic. [Read more]

To assess and avoid operational hazards in cities
Viisights helps manage operations within Israel’s cities. Viisights’ edge computing application assists city officials in identifying and managing events in densely populated areas. Its real-time detection of behavior helps officials predict how quickly an event is growing and determine if there is reason for alarm or a need to take action. [Read more]

To revolutionize the retail industry
Many retail stores and distribution centers use edge computing and computer vision to bring real-time insights to retailers, enabling them to protect their assets and streamline distribution system processes. The technology can help retailers grow their top line with efficiencies that can improve retailers’ net profit margins. [Read more]

To save lives at beaches
Sightbit developed an image detection application that helps spot dangers at beaches. Speed is very critical in these life or death situations which is why processing is done at the edge. The system detects potential dangers such as rip currents, or hazardous ocean conditions allowing authorities to enact life-saving procedures. [Read more]

To improve airline and airport operation efficiency
Airports around the world are partnering with ASSAIA to use edge computing to improve turnaround times and reduce delays. ASSAIA’s AI-enabled video analytics application produces insights that help airlines and airports make better and quicker decisions around capacity, sustainability, and safety. [Read more]

A new generation of AI applications at the edge is driving incredible operational efficiency and safety gains across a broad range of spaces. Download this free e-book to learn how edge computing is helping build smarter and safer spaces around the world.

Modern workloads such as AI and machine learning are putting tremendous pressure on traditional IT infrastructure. Enterprises that want to stay ahead of these changes can now register to participate in an early access of Project Monterey, an initiative to dramatically improve the performance, manageability and security of their environments. VMware, Dell Technologies and NVIDIA Read article >

The post Soar into the Hybrid-Cloud: Project Monterey Early Access Program Now Available to Enterprises appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

Azure recently announced support for NVIDIA’s T4 Tensor Core Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) which are optimized for deploying machine learning inferencing or analytical workloads in a cost-effective manner. With Apache Spark™ deployments tuned for NVIDIA GPUs, plus pre-installed libraries, Azure Synapse Analytics offers a simple way to leverage GPUs to power a variety of data … Continued

Azure recently announced support for NVIDIA’s T4 Tensor Core Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) which are optimized for deploying machine learning inferencing or analytical workloads in a cost-effective manner. With Apache Spark deployments tuned for NVIDIA GPUs, plus pre-installed libraries, Azure Synapse Analytics offers a simple way to leverage GPUs to power a variety of data processing and machine learning tasks. With built-in support for RAPIDS acceleration, the Azure Synapse version of GPU-accelerated Spark offers at least 2x performance gain on standard analytical benchmarks compared to running on CPUs, all without any code changes.

Currently, this GPU acceleration feature in Azure Synapse is available for private preview by request.

Benefits of NVIDIA GPU acceleration

NVIDIA GPUs offer extraordinarily high compute performance, bringing parallel processing to multi-core servers to accelerate demanding workloads. A CPU consists of a few cores optimized for sequential serial processing, whereas. On the other hand, a GPU has a massively parallel architecture consisting of thousands of smaller and more efficient cores designed to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. Considering that data scientists spend up to 80% of their time on data pre-processing, GPUs are a critical tool to accelerate data processing pipelines compared to relying on pipelines containing CPUs alone.

One of the most efficient and familiar ways to build these pipelines is using Apache Spark. The benefits of NVIDIA GPU acceleration in Apache Spark include:

• Faster to complete data processing, queries, and model training, which grants accelerated iteration and time to insight.
• The same GPU-accelerated infrastructure is helpful to eliminate the need for complex decision-making and tuning for both Spark and ML/DL frameworks.
• Fewer compute nodes are required; reducing infrastructure cost and potentially helping avoid scale-related problems.

NVIDIA and Azure synapse collaboration

NVIDIA and Azure Synapse have teamed up to bring GPU acceleration to data scientists and data engineers. This integration will give customers the freedom to use NVIDIA GPUs for Apache Spark applications with no-code changes and with an experience identical to a CPU cluster. In addition, this collaboration will continue to add support for the latest NVIDIA GPUs and networking products and provide continuous enhancements for big data customers who are looking to improve productivity and save costs with a single pipeline for data engineering, data preparation, and machine learning.

To learn more about this project, check out our presentation at NVIDIA’s GTC 2021 Conference.

Apache Spark 3.0 GPU Acceleration in Azure Synapse

While Apache Spark provides GPU support out-of-box, configuring and managing all the required hardware and installing all the low-level libraries can take significant effort. When you try GPU-enabled Apache Spark pools in Azure Synapse, you will immediately notice a surprisingly simple user experience:

Behind the scenes heavy lifting: To efficiently use GPUs, libraries are used to perform communication with the graphics card on the host machine. Installing and configuring these libraries takes time and effort. Azure Synapse takes care of pre-installing these libraries and setting up all the complex networking between compute nodes through integration with GPU Apache Spark pools. Within just a few minutes, you can stop worrying about setup and focus on solving business problems.

Optimized Spark configuration: By collaborating between NVIDIA and Azure Synapse, we have come up with optimal configurations for your GPU-enabled Apache Spark pools. Thus, your workloads run most optimally saving you both time and operational costs.

Packed with Data Prep and ML Libraries: The GPU-enabled Apache Spark pools in Azure Synapse come built-in with two popular libraries with support for more on the way:

• RAPIDS for Data Prep: RAPIDS is a suite of open-source software libraries and APIs for executing end-to-end data science and analytics pipelines entirely on GPUs for a substantial speed-up, particularly on large data sets. Built on top of NVIDIA CUDA and UCX, the RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark enables GPU-accelerated SQL, DataFrame operations, and Spark shuffles. Since there are no code changes required to leverage these accelerations, you can also accelerate your data pipelines that rely on Linux Foundation’s Delta Lake or Microsoft’s Hyperspace indexing (both of which are available on Synapse out-of-box).
• Hummingbird for accelerating scoring and inference over your traditional ML models. Hummingbird is a library for converting traditional ML operators to tensors, with the goal of accelerating inference (scoring/prediction) for traditional machine learning models.

When running NVIDIA Decision Support (NDS) test queries, derived from industry-known benchmarks, over 1 TB of Parquet data our early results indicate that GPUs can deliver nearly 2x acceleration in overall query performance, without any code changes.

• Contact us if you are interested in being added to the private preview list.
• Use the limited-time free quantities available in Azure Synapse to try new features.