Intel Unveils Deep Learning Framework for Spark

Chip giant Intel last week rolled out a new deep learning framework that runs as a Spark job atop Hadoop. Called BigDL, the open source software is designed to take advantage of hardware acceleration capabilities that Intel has built into its Xeon CPUs. BigDL, which Intel released on Github, is modeled after Torch, an open source deep learning framework used in scientific computing. Intel says the framework supports numeric computing via Tensor, as well as high level neural networks, and can be used to run prebuilt Caffe and Torch models on Spark. While many deep learning frameworks today leverage GPUs, Intel is taking a different route with BigDL, for obvious reasons.