Ray Meetup @ BAyPIGgies: Scaling AI workloads with the Ray Ecosystem

But distributed computing is not easy. It has its challenges. Building distributed applications today requires tons of expertise. For many developers, it is out of reach. Current solutions to these challenges have their shortcomings and tradeoff.

Ray aims to address these shortcomings. As a general-purpose distributed computing framework, it makes programming a cluster of machines as easy as programming a laptop, thereby enabling many more developers and practitioners to take advantage of the advances in cloud computing and scale their machine learning workloads to solve harder problems, without needing to be experts in distributed systems. Besides a core general-purpose distributed-compute system, Ray encompasses a collection of state-of-the-art native libraries targeting scalable machine learning. These include libraries for hyperparameter tuning, distributed training, reinforcement learning, model serving, and last-mile ML data pre-processing and ingestion for model training.

This talk will introduce Ray’s overview; survey its ecosystem of both native and integrated ML libraries; and discuss key applications and developments in the Ray ecosystem, drawing upon lessons from discussions with practitioners over the years of developing Ray with the community—and at Anyscale. In particular, we will demonstrate how you can easily scale three common ML workloads, from your laptop to the cluster, with Ray’s native libraries: training, hyperparameter tuning and optimization (HPO), and large-scale batch inference.

Using the popular XGBoost for classification, we will show how you can scale model training, hyperparameter tuning, and inference—from a laptop or single node to a Ray cluster, with tangible performance difference when using Ray.

The takeaways from this talk are :

• Why distributed computing has become the norm and necessity, not an exception 

• Learn Ray’s architecture, core concepts, and programming primitives 

• Understand Ray’s ecosystem of scalable ML libraries 

• Easily extend or transition your laptop to a Ray cluster 

• Scale three ML workloads using Ray’s native libraries 

• Training on a single node vs. Ray cluster, using XGBoost with/without Ray 

• Tuning HPO using XGBoost with Ray and Ray Tune 

• Inferencing at scale, using XGBoost with/without Ray

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