This Week in MLC@Home
Notes for Aug 8 2020
A weekly summary of news and notes for MLC@Home

News:

• This week we focused on behind-the-scenes work
  
• A new server for the project has been ordered buy may take a while to ship
  
• ARM32 and ARM64 clients have been created in-house but more testing is needed. Performance on the Pi4 especially is quite reasonable.
  
• We spent a lot of time this week trying to get both amd64 and ARM clients to compile statically to simplify deployment. However, the resulting binaries still have issues, and that path might not be an viable option.
  
• We intend to release a preliminary version Datasets 1 and 2 to the public for your own data science analysis as soon as we have at least 1000 samples from each machine type. This will just be a CSV file of the weights for each trained network and the label of which machine type. When the full 10k for each is done, we're release a larger dataset that includes that plus the trained models and some more metatdata about each WU's training progress.
  
• We're working on 2-3 potential different academic papers based on the work so far. One paper based on the analysis of datasets 1 and 2; another one (possibly combined with the previous) on using out weight-space analysis to detect trojan networks hidden in otherwise benign networks; and a possible third paper/talk on the engineering behind building a distributed computing project focused on ML. One conference we're targeting has a submission deadline of late September, so lots to do between now and then.
  
• In relation to the above, we're working on an new version of the client that can support CNNs as well as RNNs. This will allow us to build WUs based on more widely available synthetic network data.
  
• This week was a relatively quiet week in the forums.
  

Project status snapshot:
Tasks
Tasks ready to send 39875
Tasks in progress 19815
Users
With credit 448
Registered in past 24 hours 20
Hosts
With recent credit 1428
Registered in past 24 hours 19
Current GigaFLOPS 23319.4

Dataset 1 and 2 progress:

SingleDirectMachine       9679/10004
EightBitMachine           9626/10006
SingleInvertMachine       9684/10003
SimpleXORMachine          9647/10002
ParityMachine              305/10005
ParityModified              29/10005
EightBitModified           795/10006
SimpleXORModified         6077/10005
SingleDirectModified      6039/10004
SingleInvertModified      6130/10002 

Thanks again to all our volunteers!

-- The MLC@Home Admins

Thanks for sharing! Kudos to you for keeping up the weekly schedule on the notes/updates. Love to read that you are already thinking about extending the client software capabilities for getting it read to tackle future research questions. Even more though, that a few academic papers are already in the pipeline.

Additionally, I was very glad to read on the twitter account that you are actively looking for a Mac developer who could potentially port the application to MacOS in a matter of days if not hours, even if I can only add 2 more cores :)

Keep it up!

* We're working on 2-3 potential different academic papers based on the work so far. One paper based on the analysis of datasets 1 and 2; another one (possibly combined with the previous) on using out weight-space analysis to detect trojan networks hidden in otherwise benign networks; and a possible third paper/talk on the engineering behind building a distributed computing project focused on ML. One conference we're targeting has a submission deadline of late September, so lots to do between now and then.

That's great!! Scientific results after few weeks of project!!

Just to be clear, there's a large gap between "we're working on writing a paper or two" to "we have published, meaningful, peer-reviewed scientific results".

Just to be clear, there's a large gap between "we're working on writing a paper or two" to "we have published, meaningful, peer-reviewed scientific results".

I know, i know, but it's fantastic, anyway

Just to be clear, there's a large gap between "we're working on writing a paper or two" to "we have published, meaningful, peer-reviewed scientific results".

I know, i know, but it's fantastic, anyway

Thanks, we just didn't want to oversell it :)