Introducing the TensorFlow Research Cloud
Posted by Zak Stone, Product
Manager for TensorFlow
Researchers require enormous computational resources to train the machine
learning (ML) models that have delivered recent breakthroughs in
medical
imaging,
neural
machine translation,
game
playing, and many other domains. We believe that significantly larger
amounts of computation will make it possible for researchers to invent new types
of ML models that will be even more accurate and useful.
To accelerate the pace of open machine-learning research, we are introducing the
TensorFlow Research Cloud (TFRC),
a cluster of 1,000
Cloud TPUs that
will be made available free of charge to support a broad range of
computationally-intensive research projects that might not be possible
otherwise.
The TensorFlow Research Cloud offers researchers the following benefits:
- Access to Google's all-new Cloud
TPUs that accelerate both training and inference
- Up to 180 teraflops of floating-point performance per Cloud TPU
- 64 GB of ultra-high-bandwidth memory per Cloud TPU
- Familiar TensorFlow programming interfaces
You can
sign up
here to request to be notified when the TensorFlow Research Cloud
application process opens, and you can optionally share more information about
your computational needs. We plan to evaluate applications on a rolling basis in
search of the most creative and ambitious proposals.
The TensorFlow Research Cloud program is not limited to academia — we recognize
that people with a wide range of affiliations, roles, and expertise are making
major machine learning research contributions, and we especially encourage those
with non-traditional backgrounds to apply. Access will be granted to selected
individuals for limited amounts of compute time, and researchers are welcome to
apply multiple times with multiple projects.
Since the main goal of the TensorFlow Research Cloud is to benefit the open
machine learning research community as a whole, successful applicants will be
expected to do the following:
- Share their TFRC-supported research with the world through peer-reviewed
publications, open-source code, blog posts, or other open media
- Share concrete, constructive feedback with Google to help us improve the
TFRC program and the underlying Cloud TPU platform over time
- Imagine a future in which ML acceleration is abundant and develop new kinds
of machine learning models in anticipation of that future
For businesses interested in using Cloud TPUs for proprietary research and
development, we will offer a parallel Cloud TPU Alpha program. You can
sign up here to learn
more about this program. We recommend participating in the Cloud TPU Alpha
program if you are interested in any of the following:
- Accelerating training of proprietary ML models; models that take weeks to
train on other hardware can be trained in days or even hours on Cloud TPUs
- Accelerating batch processing of industrial-scale datasets: images, videos,
audio, unstructured text, structured data, etc.
- Processing live requests in production using larger and more complex ML
models than ever before
We hope the
TensorFlow Research
Cloud will allow as many researchers as possible to explore the frontier of
machine learning research and extend it with new discoveries! We encourage you
to
sign up today to
be among the first to know as more information becomes available.
