Rust ML WG Meeting 00020

Meeting Info

Date: 20210303

Start time: 1400 ET

Introduction for new attendees
Ricky: increase participation or activities the group does?
Updates on linfa
Chris + Manuel have been working bit together on an AlexNet-like convolutional network for CIFAR-10
- Backporting updates in joint repo to individual frameworks
- Still double-checking backprop and stacking in convolutional layers
Description/updates on Enzyme, autodiff on LLVM level

Quick overview of how these meetings work
- Writing objectives into the agenda and run a description
Linfa has been working on documentation updates
- Chris M is (again) looking to move forward with adding to a Linfa Book
Potentially expecting a 0.3.1 release in the next two weeks
Have been working on solving the CIFAR-10 dataset using convolutional layers
Manuel has been working a bit with Billy on Enzyme
Enzyme description, has been working with different kinds of memory allocations
- Are we using BLAS/LAPACK on our existing CNN implementations?
  - ndarray has BLAS/LAPACK support, but preliminary stuff didn't demonstrate initial
- ndarray and nalgebra are both linear algebra libraries, although ndarray is more typically used for scientific computation
  - Might not be able to use LLVM differentiation on different backends?
Any suggestions for how best to distribute time to make Enzyme more useful in Rust?
- Internal scripting approach vs. hacking on rustc?
  - No plugins currently exist in the rustc compiler (at least on stable)
  - https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/automatic-differentiation-differential-programming-via-llvm/13188/6
How well does 1400 ET work for everyone?
- Got better attendance
- We'll keep meetings every two weeks for one hour, although there is some interest in every week for a shorter amount of time (30 min?)
Steven introduced himself
- Just getting started coding in Rust, hoping to learn and join and see what he can contribute
- Background in biophysics

Chat in Zulip and create a survey for pariticpants that has better dates and times, or frequencies for the meetings
Chris M to touch base with Billy about setting up a Google Calendar event for meetings and/or recurring video meetings for pair programming
Clean-up linfa roadmap