Mark Hamilton, Nick Gonsalves, Christina Lee et al.
Deploying Machine Learning (ML) algorithms within databases is a challenge due to the varied computational footprints of modern ML algorithms and the myriad of database technologies each with its own restrictive syntax. We introduce an Apache Spark-based micro-service orchestration framework that extends database operations to include web service primitives. Our system can orchestrate web services across hundreds of machines and takes full advantage of cluster, thread, and asynchronous parallelism. Using this framework, we provide large scale clients for intelligent services such as speech, vision, search, anomaly detection, and text analysis. This allows users to integrate ready-to-use intelligence into any datastore with an Apache Spark connector. To eliminate the majority of overhead from network communication, we also introduce a low-latency containerized version of our architecture. Finally, we demonstrate that the services we investigate are competitive on a variety of benchmarks, and present two applications of this framework to create intelligent search engines, and real-time auto race analytics systems.
PennyLane is a Python 3 software framework for differentiable programming of quantum computers. The library provides a unified architecture for near-term quantum computing devices, supporting both qubit and continuous-variable paradigms. PennyLane's core feature is the ability to compute gradients of variational quantum circuits in a way that is compatible with classical techniques such as backpropagation. PennyLane thus extends the automatic differentiation algorithms common in optimization and machine learning to include quantum and hybrid computations. A plugin system makes the framework compatible with any gate-based quantum simulator or hardware. We provide plugins for hardware providers including the Xanadu Cloud, Amazon Braket, and IBM Quantum, allowing PennyLane optimizations to be run on publicly accessible quantum devices. On the classical front, PennyLane interfaces with accelerated machine learning libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, and Autograd. PennyLane can be used for the optimization of variational quantum eigensolvers, quantum approximate optimization, quantum machine learning models, and many other applications.