Grid Computing
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files. Grid computing is distinguished from conventional high-performance computing systems such as cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed (thus not physically coupled) than cluster computers.[1] Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid middleware software libraries. Grid sizes can be quite large.[2] Grids are a form of distributed computing whereby a ‘super virtual computer’ is composed of many networked loosely coupled computers acting together to perform large tasks. For certain applications, distributed or grid computing can be seen as a special type of parallel computing that relies on complete computers (with onboard CPUs, storage, power supplies, network interfaces, etc.) connected to a computer network (private or public) by a conventional network interface, such as Ethernet. This is in contrast to the traditional notion of a supercomputer, which has many processors connected by a local high-speed computer bus. …

Dual Lasso Selector
We consider the problem of model selection and estimation in sparse high dimensional linear regression models with strongly correlated variables. First, we study the theoretical properties of the dual Lasso solution, and we show that joint consideration of the Lasso primal and its dual solutions are useful for selecting correlated active variables. Second, we argue that correlations among active predictors are not problematic, and we derive a new weaker condition on the design matrix, called Pseudo Irrepresentable Condition (PIC). Third, we present a new variable selection procedure, Dual Lasso Selector, and we prove that the PIC is a necessary and sufficient condition for consistent variable selection for the proposed method. Finally, by combining the dual Lasso selector further with the Ridge estimation even better prediction performance is achieved. We call the combination (DLSelect+Ridge), it can be viewed as a new combined approach for inference in high-dimensional regression models with correlated variables. We illustrate DLSelect+Ridge method and compare it with popular existing methods in terms of variable selection, prediction accuracy, estimation accuracy and computation speed by considering various simulated and real data examples. …

Keras
Keras is a high-level neural networks library, written in Python and capable of running on top of either TensorFlow or Theano. It was developed with a focus on enabling fast experimentation. Use Keras if you need a deep learning library that:
• Allows for easy and fast prototyping (through total modularity, minimalism, and extensibility).
• Supports both convolutional networks and recurrent networks, as well as combinations of the two.
• Supports arbitrary connectivity schemes (including multi-input and multi-output training).
• Runs seamlessly on CPU and GPU.
Deep Learning with Keras …

Sample, Operation, Attribute, and Parameter Dimensions (SOAP)
The computational requirements for training deep neural networks (DNNs) have grown to the point that it is now standard practice to parallelize training. Existing deep learning systems commonly use data or model parallelism, but unfortunately, these strategies often result in suboptimal parallelization performance. In this paper, we define a more comprehensive search space of parallelization strategies for DNNs called SOAP, which includes strategies to parallelize a DNN in the Sample, Operation, Attribute, and Parameter dimensions. We also propose FlexFlow, a deep learning framework that uses guided randomized search of the SOAP space to find a fast parallelization strategy for a specific parallel machine. To accelerate this search, FlexFlow introduces a novel execution simulator that can accurately predict a parallelization strategy’s performance and is three orders of magnitude faster than prior approaches that have to execute each strategy. We evaluate FlexFlow with six real-world DNN benchmarks on two GPU clusters and show that FlexFlow can increase training throughput by up to 3.8x over state-of-the-art approaches, even when including its search time, and also improves scalability. …