Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit Release 17.02

The NVIDIA container image of Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, release 17.02, is available.

Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit container image version 17.02 is based on Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit 2.0.beta9.0.

Contents of the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit

This container image contains the source files that are used to build the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit in the /opt/cntk directory. The Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit binaries are pre-built and installed into the /usr/local/cntk directory.

A Python 3.4 Conda environment (including the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit module) is installed in the /opt/conda/envs/cntk-py34 directory. This is included in PATH, so by default the python command executes a Python 3.4 interpreter. To use the base Ubuntu Python 2.7 binary, you can either adjust PATH or explicitly call /usr/bin/python. This image of the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, 2.0beta9.0, is built with the following options enabled:

1-bit SGD
Async SGD
Python API
OpenCV
Kaldi

The container also includes the following:

Ubuntu 14.04
NVIDIA CUDA^® 8.0.61
NVIDIA CUDA^® Deep Neural Network library™ (cuDNN) 6.0.13
NCCL 1.6.1 (optimized for NVLink™ )

Key Features and Enhancements

This Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit release includes the following key features and enhancements.

Dilated convolution support added to new features
Ubuntu 14.04 with January 2017 updates

Known Issues

The Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit 17.02 container has a known issue in which the v2librarytest TrainSequenceToSequenceTranslator unit test fails due to a bug in the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit C++ Library API’s TextFormatMinibatchSource object.

The Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit 2.0 Beta9 introduced RandomArea cropping. This is useful for Inception style networks. To avoid confusion, the Random crop mode available in previous releases was renamed to RandomSide. Users will need to update BrainScripts accordingly.