Facebook brings GPU-powered machine learning to Python

Facebook's AI research team has released a Python package for GPU-accelerated deep neural network programming that can complement or partly replace existing Python packages for math and stats, such as NumPy. A Python implementation of the Torch machine learning framework, PyTorch has enjoyed broad uptake at Twitter, Carnegie Mellon University, Salesforce, and Facebook. Torch was originally implemented in C with a wrapper in the Lua scripting language, but PyTorch wraps the core Torch binaries in Python and provides GPU acceleration for many functions. Torch is a tensor library for manipulating multidimensional matrices of data employed in machine learning and many other math-intensive applications. PyTorch provides libraries for basic tensor manipulation on CPUs or GPUs, a built-in neural network library, model training utilities, and a multiprocessing library that can work with shared memory, "useful for data loading and hogwild training," as PyTorch's developers put it.