Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit Release 17.11

The NVIDIA container image of Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, release 17.11, is available.

Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit container image version 17.11 is based on Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit 2.2.

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 2.2, is built with the following options enabled:

Async SGD
Python 3 API
OpenCV
Kaldi

The container also includes the following:

Ubuntu 16.04
NVIDIA CUDA 9.0.176 including CUDA^® Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines library™ (cuBLAS) 9.0.234
NVIDIA CUDA^® Deep Neural Network library™ (cuDNN) 7.0.4
NCCL 2.1.2 (optimized for NVLink™ )
OpenMPI™ 3.0.0

Driver Requirements

Release 17.11 is based on CUDA 9, which requires NVIDIA Driver release 384.xx.

Key Features and Enhancements

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

The version of MPI included in the container was bumped from 1.10 to 3.0.0 in order to correct a bug in which GPU memory exhaustion could cause the framework to hang.
Latest version of CUDA
Latest version of cuDNN
Latest version of NCCL
Ubuntu 16.04 with October 2017 updates

Known Issues

There are no known issues in this release.