NSML: Meet the MLaaS platform with a real-world case study

The boom of deep learning induced many industries and academies to introduce machine learning based approaches into their concern, competitively. However, existing machine learning frameworks are limited to sufficiently fulfill the collaboration and management for both data and models. We proposed NSML, a machine learning as a service (MLaaS) platform, to meet these demands. NSML helps machine learning work be easily launched on a NSML cluster and provides a collaborative environment which can afford development at enterprise scale. Finally, NSML users can deploy their own commercial services with NSML cluster. In addition, NSML furnishes convenient visualization tools which assist the users in analyzing their work. To verify the usefulness and accessibility of NSML, we performed some experiments with common examples. Furthermore, we examined the collaborative advantages of NSML through three competitions with real-world use cases.

NSML: A Machine Learning Platform That Enables You to Focus on Your Models

Machine learning libraries such as TensorFlow and PyTorch simplify model implementation. However, researchers are still required to perform a non-trivial amount of manual tasks such as GPU allocation, training status tracking, and comparison of models with different hyperparameter settings. We propose a system to handle these tasks and help researchers focus on models. We present the requirements of the system based on a collection of discussions from an online study group comprising 25k members. These include automatic GPU allocation, learning status visualization, handling model parameter snapshots as well as hyperparameter modification during learning, and comparison of performance metrics between models via a leaderboard. We describe the system architecture that fulfills these requirements and present a proof-of-concept implementation, NAVER Smart Machine Learning (NSML). We test the system and confirm substantial efficiency improvements for model development.