Nervana's deep learning platform provides unprecedented computing power through specialized hardware. It includes a fast deep learning framework called Neon that is 10 times faster than other frameworks on GPUs. Neon also includes pre-trained models and is under active development to improve capabilities like distributed computing and integration with other frameworks. Nervana aims to make deep learning more accessible and applicable across industries like healthcare, automotive, finance, and more.

1. Proprietary and confidential. Do not distribute.
Nervana’s Deep
Learning Platform
MAKING MACHINES SMARTER.™
Hanlin Tang, PhD
Algorithms Engineer

2. Facebook DeepMask
Silver et al, 2016
The Atlantic, March 2016
“The error rate has been cut by a factor of
two in all the languages, more than a factor of
two in many cases. That’s mostly due to deep
learning and the way we have optimized it …”
Alex Acero, Siri Senior Director, Apple
Article in Backhannel/WIRED, Aug 2016
Deep Learning

3. neon deep
learning
framework
train deployexplore
nervana
engine
Fastest deep learning
framework
cloudn

4. • Unprecedented computing power
• 10x speedup over current Maxwell
GPUs (~55 TeraOps)
• 32 GB High-Bandwidth Memory
• Six bi-directional high-bandwidth links
for 3D torus interconnect
• 8 chips in a box, seamlessly scale to
multiple chassis

5. https://github.com/NervanaSystems/neon

6. • https://github.com/NervanaSystems/ModelZoo
• Pre-trained weights and models
SegNet
Deep Speech 2
Skip-thought
Autoencoders
Deep Dream

7. Badrinarayanan et al., 2015

8. Neon (ms) Caffe (ms) Speed-up
Forward 101 719 7.1x
Backward 164 746 4.5x
Total 265 1455 5.5x

9. neon v1.6 + mgpu v1.6
neon v2.0
Modular dataloader (aeon)
Neural machine translation model
neon v3.0
• Nervana Graph
• Tensorflow inter-operability
• Graph-enabled models
• Distributed computing

11. “Training neural networks is a dark art.”
Hyperparameters:
•Number and type of units/layers
•Convolution filter size
•Weight Initialization
•Optimization method
•Learning Rate schedule

13. Command Line client Web Interface

14. Nervana in action
Healthcare: Tumor detection
Automotive: Speech interfaces
Finance: Time-series search
engine
Positive:
Negative:
Agricultural Robotics Oil & Gas
Positive:
Negative:
Proteomics: Sequence analysis
Query:
Results:

15. + n