Hello and Welcome to Data Driven.

In this episode, Frank and Andy speak with researcher Matteo Interlandi about project Hummingbird.

Audio file

matteo-mixdown.mp3

Transcript

00:00:00 BAILey

Hello and welcome to dated driven.

00:00:02 BAILey

In this episode, Frank and Andy speak with researcher Matteo Interlandi about project Hummingbird.

00:00:09 BAILey

Now on with the show.

00:00:10 Frank

Second, hello and welcome to data driven.

00:00:21 Frank

The podcast where we explore the emerging fields of data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

00:00:27 Frank

If you'd like to think of data as the new oil, then you can consider us.

00:00:30 Frank

Car Talk because we focus on where the rubber meets the virtual road and with me on this epic Rd.

00:00:36 Frank

We're on the information superhighway as oh is Andy Leonard.

00:00:39 Frank

How you doing Andy?

00:00:40 Andy

I'm well Frank, how are?

00:00:41 Frank

You I'm doing alright. We're recording this on Wednesday, September 1st, 2021 and the the.

00:00:51 Frank

The the remnants of Hurricane Ida are ripping through the DC area.

00:00:57 Frank

Uh, so if, uh, if I suddenly get dropped, that's because we probably lost power.

00:01:03 Frank

But I do have the backup generator, the one that the professionals installed and my.

00:01:10 Frank

Duct taped together a solar generator so.

00:01:15 Frank

I will be offline.

00:01:17 Frank

For a short.

00:01:18 Frank

Bit and hopefully come back online.

00:01:20 Frank

How how you doing, Eddie.

00:01:23 Andy

I'm doing alright Frank. Well, we are you know I'm about gosh 250 miles South of UM we didn't get near the near the effects of Hurricane Ida as you did.

00:01:34 Andy

We're getting a little bit of rain now.

00:01:36 Andy

We've had some wind.

00:01:37 Andy

Gusts, but it's been really mild, and if you look on the radar.

00:01:41 Andy

Gotta watch it into track and I I do.

00:01:43 Andy

I'm a weather weenie and amateur but it it just kind of went around us to the to the West and it actually started the east when it got a little north of us and aimed right for your house.

00:01:54 Andy

I was looking outside that's where Frank lived, right?

00:01:56 Andy

And look, the eye is coming right for.

00:01:58 Andy

Frank what's left?

00:02:00 Frank

Well, fortunately we're safe.

00:02:02 Frank

There was some kind of flooding in Rockville and the small overnight, and some folks they got up.

00:02:09 Frank

No one, nobody died that I'm.

00:02:10 Frank

Aware of so.

00:02:11

It it says.

00:02:12 Frank

You know we're not.

00:02:13 Frank

Custom the floods or hurricanes or tornadoes up here in DC and and we're more used to the human threats of, you know, little things like terrorism and things.

00:02:25 Frank

Like that, but.

00:02:26 Andy

Yeah yeah, you guys got a little bit more to worry about that than we do here in FarmVille, right?

00:02:32 Andy

But you know these days.

00:02:33 Andy

Who knows?

00:02:35 Andy

The, uh, definitely our thoughts and prayers are with the folks in in Louisiana and Mississippi.

00:02:40 Andy

They were hit very hard.

00:02:42 Andy

I've got got friends in Georgia, Western Georgia were telling me that.

00:02:47 Andy

They they took a beating as well and you know it just it looks horrible I.

00:02:53 Andy

I you know, I've I've been in a few of those places after hurricanes have hit as part of like church efforts to help clean up and stabilize and stuff like that.

00:03:04 Andy

It looks like I don't know.

00:03:06 Andy

They people describe it as like a war.

00:03:09 Andy

I've never been in a war so I don't know.

00:03:10 Andy

I've seen pictures and.

00:03:13 Andy

There's a lot.

00:03:14 Andy

It looks like a lot of stuff is blowing over, and that sort of.

00:03:16 Andy

Stuff, it's just.

00:03:18 Andy

So, and they're talking weeks and weeks before power comes back on.

00:03:22 Frank

That's horrible, that's.

00:03:23 Andy

Similar places, yeah.

00:03:25 Frank

That's that's.

00:03:26 Frank

Probably going to be do more damage from for a lot of things.

00:03:30 Andy

Were you worried?

00:03:30

But on a.

00:03:30 Frank

More positive note, uh, a positive note.

00:03:31 Andy

Yes, on a positive note.

00:03:35 Frank

Uh, we are.

00:03:37 Frank

I am super excited to have a special guest and I say super excited because he's from Microsoft.

00:03:42 Frank

He's a senior scientist in Jelt at Microsoft, working on scalable machine learning systems.

00:03:50 Frank

Before he was at Microsoft, he was a postdoc scholar at the Computer Science department at UCLA, and this he was doing a lot of interesting stuff there.

00:04:03 Frank

He was doing research at Qatar or Qatar.

00:04:05 Frank

I'm not sure how to say that exactly, but he has a PhD in computer science.

00:04:11 Frank

In university.

00:04:12 Frank

Of Modena and or?

00:04:15 Frank

I'm going to botch this.

00:04:15 Frank

Reggio Emilia.

00:04:17 Frank

Welcome to the show, Mateo.

00:04:22 Frank

Awesome, so we are really excited to have you here.

00:04:25 Frank

We actually booked you a whole month in advance.

00:04:27 Frank

I've been looking forward to this.

00:04:29 Frank

Yeah, because you're coming by way of some of the folks at the Mlad conference.

00:04:35 Frank

And for those who don't know, I'm a I've mentioned this.

00:04:37 Frank

Mlad stands for machine learning and data science summit.

00:04:40 Frank

It used to be in person I think now it's entirely virtual for the foreseeable future.

00:04:45 Frank

Uh, but that why I attended M lads in 2016 summer of 2016 and it was uh, it was life altering like I don't say that.

00:04:55 Frank

Lightly so.

00:04:56 Frank

So Microsoft does amazing work in the machine learning and data science space.

00:05:02 Frank

Very much cutting edge stuff very much I.

00:05:06 Frank

I wouldn't say under the radar, but Microsoft does not do a great job putting its own horn, so we're very excited for you to come on Mateo and talk about this little project that you're working on.

00:05:17 Frank

And what is the is it have a code name or what?

00:05:20 Frank

What is it called?

00:05:22 Matteo

Hummingbird should the code name is actually I'm in.

00:05:26 Matteo

Don't have any specific internal names for.

00:05:28 Matteo

This for this.

00:05:28 Frank

OK, what what is GL stand for?

00:05:32 Frank

That was my that was my first question.

00:05:33 Frank

When I saw your bio.

00:05:35 Matteo

Uh is for Gray system lamp and is the after Jim Gray which.

00:05:41

Oh, OK.

00:05:41 Matteo

Is putting award yeah?

00:05:45

OK.

00:05:46 Matteo

So these are the search lab after this name yeah and use within the Azure data organization.

00:05:49

Oh, interesting.

00:05:53 Frank

And uhm, So what?

00:05:56 Frank

What what cool stuff does Hummingbird do?

00:06:00 Matteo

So, Hummingbird, uh?

00:06:03 Matteo

Is a little bit, uh, weird project in the sense that when we started this project we didn't know if it was going to.

00:06:10 Matteo

To be a success or not?

00:06:12 Matteo

Because what we try to do basically is to uhm translate traditional machine learning models and into neural networks.

00:06:22 Matteo

Actually not Internet format into tensor programs such that then we can run over tensor runtime, such as pipers.

00:06:30 Matteo

In terms of.

00:06:32 Matteo

Uhm, so when we started this project actually idea was hey there is a lot of investment in general pulling into this neural network frameworks and.

00:06:45 Matteo

Coming from the Azure data organization, instead, we are more interested in these traditional machine learning methods such as decision trees.

00:06:52 Matteo

Linear models were not encoding all those boring traditional algorithms.

00:07:00 Matteo

And so we look at this.

00:07:01 Matteo

The neural network system and say hey how we can take advantage of all this technology that is built.

00:07:05 Matteo

Into this domain so you can run neural.

00:07:08 Matteo

Network over CPU.

00:07:10 Matteo

Over the GPU, then you can use like fancy compilers to compile to generate the transfer programs.

00:07:16 Matteo

All those sort of techniques and we were.

00:07:19 Matteo

Kind of struggling.

00:07:20 Matteo

To see what we could do with the with this stack and and what we come up with with is this Amber project.

00:07:27 Matteo

So we basically take a.

00:07:32 Matteo

Traditional machine learning pipelines composed right feature iser and machine learning models.

00:07:37 Matteo

After the day trained.

00:07:39 Matteo

So first you need to train it using cycle ornamental net or.

00:07:43 Matteo

Uhm, uhm, one of those traditional machine learning platforms and then once it is trained we basically convert it into a set of tensor operations in.

00:07:54 Matteo

In the current version we use basically PY torch for doing this conversion and then basically you have a pipeline model so you can do whatever you can do with Python.

00:08:03 Matteo

Models so you can deploy it in in it into a PY torch.

00:08:08 Matteo

Uhm, deployments you can run over CPU ran over the GPU or you can do the torch script if you want to get rid of all the Python dependency and just have a C++ program you can.

00:08:19 Matteo

Do all those all those tricks.

00:08:22 Frank

Interesting, does it impact accuracy precision?

00:08:26 Frank

Does it improve it?

00:08:27 Frank

Keep it the same.

00:08:29 Matteo

We tried to keep it the same so we are able to keep.

00:08:33 Matteo

It The same up to floating point numbers roundings?

00:08:36 Matteo

So since we use, you know we use PY torch to run these programs and not like a socket or ornamental net.

00:08:44 Matteo

There are some differences in how they do you know, floating point operations.

00:08:48 Matteo

So the.

00:08:49 Matteo

Accuracy is up to roundings in the Floating Points, which sometimes are actually.

00:08:54 Matteo

It can be quite a bit, but most of the time is really small, almost not noticeable.

00:09:00 Frank

Interesting, interesting, uhm.

00:09:03 Frank

Do you would you know.

00:09:05 Frank

If there was like.

00:09:06 Frank

A discrepancy, or you Dutch as part of testing?

00:09:09 Matteo

It's part of testing.

00:09:10 Frank

Right, all software is tested, right Andy?

00:09:11 Matteo

So we have we have.

00:09:13 Frank

Sometimes intentionally is that the email.

00:09:15 Andy

That's right.

00:09:17 Frank

And he has a saying where all softwares I I forget exactly what it is.

00:09:21 Frank

But what is it?

00:09:23 Andy

Yeah, all software is tested, some intentionally.

00:09:27 Frank

There you go.

00:09:30 Frank

Uhm, so what's the?

00:09:33 Frank

What's the real?

00:09:34 Frank

What are?

00:09:34 Frank

What are the advantages of of of converting kind of a traditional model over to a tensor model?

00:09:41 Frank

Is it?

00:09:41 Frank

Is it portability?

00:09:42 Frank

Is it speed?

00:09:43 Frank

You did mention that you can run it on.

00:09:45 Frank

You could take advantage of GPU as well as CPU.

00:09:51 Matteo

Yes, exactly so you most mostly is related to speed, so you can basically run your socket, learn model on GPU end to end and and this user provides you know a little bit of quite a bit of speed up we for some of our example we even saw like 2 ordinal Magneto speedups.

00:10:11 Matteo

For some of the models.

00:10:13 Matteo

And uhm, and usually we try to show that.

00:10:18 Matteo

If you use GPU.

00:10:19 Matteo

Can be much faster, but on CPU we try to be kind of as close as possible scikit learn or the base or the base or diminished model.

00:10:27 Matteo

Sometimes we can, sometimes we are a little bit slower.

00:10:31 Matteo

Uh, but we.

00:10:32 Matteo

We had some really interesting result.

00:10:34 Matteo

Like for instance, we did some experiment with some.

00:10:39 Matteo

Some folks at the VM and we took some extra boost model and we compiled some training accuracy boost model.

00:10:47 Matteo

Uh, using Hummingbird anti VM into some uh, we basically do code generation and we show that the that model that was compiled to Python was even faster than they quoted the C++ implementation that they're having next used, but those CPU and GPU. Yeah, there was kind of OK. What's going on?

00:11:06 Matteo

This is not.

00:11:08 Matteo

This was not expected.

00:11:08 Frank

Wait, did you say it was faster than a C++ implementation?

00:11:11 Matteo

Yes, I mean if she used.

00:11:13 Matteo

Underneath C++ even scikit learn.

00:11:15 Matteo

You know they use like.

00:11:16 Matteo

From C++ library and yeah, using TVM for doing the code generation, they are able to do like a operator fusion which you don't normally have for like these traditional models.

00:11:28 Matteo

So we told these tricks bigger, basically that are coming from the neural network.

00:11:31 Matteo

Famous we were able to get like this.

00:11:34 Matteo

These surprising numbers.

00:11:36 Frank

Interesting, so that's a real performance boost, and probably if you scale that up into the cloud that probably.

00:11:44 Frank

Means a lot of money saving too in terms of on cloud computing things like, I imagine a company like the size of Microsoft would be very interested in getting better results faster with less cloud compute.

00:11:56 Frank

You did mention an acronym, I just wanna make sure folks know.

00:11:59 Frank

What that is?

00:12:00 Frank

Tyvm what is that?

00:12:03 Matteo

Uh, I don't know what is exactly for, uh, some tensor maybe?

00:12:08 Frank

Andy looks like he knows, but he's on mute.

00:12:10 Andy

I don't, yeah I I don't know.

00:12:13 Frank

OK, I'm just curious.

00:12:13 Andy

I'll go look it up.

00:12:15 Frank

There you go.

00:12:16 Andy

EVM acronym.

00:12:19 Matteo

I think is for tensor virtual machine, but I'm.

00:12:21 Matteo

Not sure if this is approach.

00:12:22 Frank

That sounds about right.

00:12:23 Frank

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