15–18 Apr 2019
CERN
Europe/Zurich timezone
There is a live webcast for this event.

Containers for Machine Learning in HEP

16 Apr 2019, 10:25
20m
500/1-001 - Main Auditorium (CERN)

500/1-001 - Main Auditorium

CERN

400
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Speaker

Matthew Feickert (Southern Methodist University (US))

Description

Physicists want to use modern open source machine learning tools developed by industry for machine learning projects and analyses in high energy physics. The software environment that a physicist prototypes, tests, and runs these projects in is ideally the same regardless of compute site (be it their laptop or on the GRID). However, historically it has been difficult to find compute sites that have both the desired hardware resources for machine learning (i.e. GPUs) and a compatible software environment for the project, resulting in suboptimal use of resources and wasted researcher time tuning their software requirements to the imposed constraints. Container technologies, such as Docker and Singularity, provide a scalable and robust solution to this problem.

We present work by Heinrich demonstrating the use of containers to run analysis jobs in reproducible compute environments at GRID endpoints with GPU resources that support Singularity. We additionally present complimentary work by Feickert that provides publicly available "base" Docker images of a HEP orientated machine learning environment: the CentOS 7 file system with the ATLAS "standalone" analysis release AnalysisBase, HDF5 support and utilities, and modern Python 3 with pip with libraries such as NumPy, TensorFlow and uproot installed. We further present ongoing synergetic work to expand both these efforts.

Preferred contribution length 20 minutes

Primary authors

Matthew Feickert (Southern Methodist University (US)) Lukas Alexander Heinrich (CERN) Dan Guest (University of California Irvine (US))

Presentation materials