Softlayer is a software platform that provides a flexible platform to build, test, and deploy neural networks for use in deep learning applications.
This post focuses on the Softlayer development framework, which provides developers with a set of tools that they can use to create, test and deploy their neural network code.
Softlayer developers can easily add support for a wide range of hardware architectures, including Nvidia GPUs, Intel Xeon E3-1200 v3 CPUs, AMD Radeon GPUs, and even ARM-based platforms.
SoftLayer can be installed on all major operating systems and has been designed to be easy to use.
It’s not a very complicated software tool to use, and the team behind Softlayer have already made a few very well-known neural network libraries available for use with the SoftLayer development framework.
The team behind Neural Network Development Framework has recently announced SoftLayer 2.0, which is expected to be released sometime in late 2016.
Neural Network Testing and Development Softlayer 2.1, released today, includes many new features for testing neural network architectures.
These include support for the following new hardware architectures: Nvidia GPUs (Vega, Nvidia Kaveri, and Maxwell) and Intel Xeon GPUs (E5-2600 v3, E5-2700 v4, and Xeon Phi) and AMD Radeon R7 (E3-1280 v3) and Nvidia Quadro K6000 (K6000-X and K6000-V) sources TechRadar article SoftLayer developer tools for deep learning neural networks are no longer limited to hardware architectures.
Softlayder developers can now use SoftLayer as a testing platform for neural networks, as well as run a number of other types of neural network tests on it.
For instance, SoftLayer now includes a testing framework that runs on both the CPU and GPU.
To use this framework, you can download the Softlayer_Test_Framework.exe package, which contains a command line tool called SoftLayerTest.exe.
In this example, SoftlayerTest.cmd will run SoftLayer test data using a variety of data structures, including Python dataframes, Python dictionaries, and a JSON API.
You can also use this tool to run an arbitrary test script on the softlayer, as shown in the following example.
The test script, called “softlayer-test.py”, runs SoftLayer against the Soft layer data frame in the Python data frame test.
In order to test the soft layer’s memory, it uses the memory of the memory network and a Python dictionary of the network’s inputs and outputs.
The softlayer-data-frame test script will then run Softlayer on the GPU memory and test the memory against the memory for memory accuracy.
You’ll need to provide a Python file with your test data that contains the memory addresses of the inputs and the outputs.
This example test script contains an array of data objects, called inputData and outputData, that are used to store the memory address of the input and output data.
When you run the test script with the command softlayer_test.exe –test, the softlayer-test data file will be written to the hard disk.
The outputData is the memory representation of the data output to the GPU, and it contains the address of a memory location.
The first three bytes of this file are the address in memory of each input data object.
The last four bytes are the memory location of the output data object and can be used to retrieve the memory from the softLayer.
In the following examples, we’ll be testing a softlayer network with an Intel Xeon Phi processor.
Note: The example script below is the same as the one included with the previous version of SoftLayer.
The memory address and address range of each outputData and inputData are different for this version of the soft-layer test.
–softlayer_data-file test.py –inputData inputData_size.py -m 1024 –outputData outputData_length.py Softlayer test results.
In some examples, the outputData contains a single byte and the address is the address used by the GPU.
This test results in an outputData of 0, which indicates that the GPU failed to allocate memory for the inputData data.
Soft layer network testing tools are often a great way to get a feel for the performance of a neural network on the CPU or GPU.
The example above is an example of using the Soft Layer test script to test memory on a soft-Layer network with a GeForce GPU.
–hardlayer_tests.py test_softlayer.py softlayer –inputSoftLayer_Data_Size.py inputData.py 0 –outputSoftLayerOutput_Data.txt outputData.xls –softLayer_Test.py hardlayer –test_hardlayer.bat –inputHardLayer_Output_Size_xls inputSoftLayer.xlsm –outputHardLayerOutput _Size.x