Chainer Development Plan 2015/12

Chainer Development Plan 2015/12

• 1.
  Chainer: Development Plan 2015/12 ChainerMeetup #1 Seiya Tokui, Preferred Networks
• 2.
  Developtment history  6/12:v1.0 (first release)  7/7: v1.1 – Caffe reference model, type checking (forward/backward), Py3 support  8/19: v1.2 (improvements)  9/2: v1.3 – CuPy, functions module is reorganized  10/28: v1.4 (improvements)  11/25: v1.5 – Link/Chain (modularization), CuPy Cythonized (reduce CPU overhead)
• 3.
  Apologies  Installation getscomplicated since v1.5 – The complication comes from the combination of Cython, h5py, and old setuptools – We have started the installation test – The PyPI package of Chainer is now Cython-free (translated C++ source files are included instead of pyx files) – We will make h5py support optional in v1.6
• 4.
  Development policy fromv1.6  Decide based on the keywords: Powerful, Flexible, and Intuitive  The first target users are researchers, students, and practitioners  Put more efforts on: – Simple and easy installation on diverse environments (not meaning various OSes) – Backward compatibility – Documentation, tutorials, and examples
• 5.
  New release cycle More stable release cycle – Revision release for each two weeks (same as before)  Changes not including any interface change  Bug fixes, performance improvements, test improvements, document updates, etc. – Minor release for each six weeks  Changes with additional interfaces  New classes, new functions, new arguments, new variables, etc.  We will keep the backward compatibility as much as possible – I am writing Backward Compatibility Policy for the next releases – Will make it public in Jan. 6
• 6.
  Release schedule basedon the new cycle  1.6.0 – Jan. 20  1.6.1 – Feb. 3  1.6.2 – Feb. 17  1.7.0 – Mar. 2  1.7.1 – Mar. 16  1.7.2 – Mar. 30  1.8.0 – Apr. 13  and so on ……
• 7.
  External libraries support NumPy – 1.10 will be supported from v1.6  cuDNN – We want v4 support (#756) – still keeping v2 support (v2 is not even one year old!!)  Protobuf (for CaffeFunction) – We have confirmed that we can support CaffeFunction in Py3 with protobuf 3.0.0-beta – We will update the caffe_pb2 script to support it
• 8.
  Future release: v1.6 On Jan. 20  Merge bufferred feature PRs – Dicision will be made based on the “Backward Compatibility Policy”  Make h5py support optional – We will add an npz serializer instead  Support NumPy 1.10
• 9.
  Future release: v1.7 Profiling and continuous performance checking – Preparation for optimization attempts in the future – For both Chainer and CuPy  Global configurations and debug mode – The basic framework for managing global configurations of Chainer – Debug/Release mode based on it – Debug mode will include: floating point error in CuPy, NaN checking, users’ debug codes support, type checking, etc.
• 10.
  Possible features inthe future (not decided yet!)  Isolate CuPy – Make CuPy separate repository and package – It will make the CuPy development faster, and will encourage non-DL usages of CuPy  Renewal of tutorials and examples – Consistent code design and style between examples – More “modern” introduction to DL with Chainer  Abstraction of common routines in learning loops – Data loading, minibatch building, updates, snapshot/suspend/resume, and logging – Easy-to-use multiprocess learning – Design is not yet started (sklearn style? Supporting custom data loading routines?)  More support of Caffe reference models (e.g. chains with converted parameters)  Official AMI support  Way to share models within the community (like Model Zoo)