Accelerating open science and AI with automated, portable, customizable and reusable research components and workflows

The original presentation was shared via SlideShare. Validating experimental results from articles has finally become a norm at many systems and ML conferences. Nowadays, more than half of accepted papers pass artifact evaluation and share related code and data. Unfortunately, lack of a common experimental framework, common research methodology, and common formats places an increasing burden on evaluators to validate a growing number of ad-hoc artifacts. Furthermore, having too many ad-hoc artifacts and Docker snapshots is almost as bad as not having any (!), since they cannot be easily reused, customized and built upon. While overviewing more than 100 papers during artifact evaluation at PPoPP, CGO, PACT, Supercomputing, and other conferences, we noticed that many of them use similar experimental setups, benchmarks, models, data sets, environments and platforms. This motivated us to develop Collective Knowledge (CK), an open workflow framework with a unified Python API to automate common researchers’ tasks such as detecting software and hardware dependencies, installing missing packages, downloading data sets and models, compiling and running programs, performing autotuning and co-design, crowdsourcing time-consuming experiments across computing resources provided by volunteers similar to SETI@home, applying statistical analysis and machine learning, validating results and plotting them on a common scoreboard for open and fair comparison, automatically generating interactive articles, and so on: cKnowledge.org. In this presentation, we will introduce CK concepts and present several real-world use cases from General Motors and Arm on collaborative benchmarking, autotuning and co-design of efficient software/hardware stacks for deep learning. We also present results and reusable CK components from the 1st ACM ReQuEST optimization tournament: http://cKnowledge.org/request. Finally, we introduce our latest initiative to create an open repository of reusable research components and workflows to reboot and accelerate open science, quantum computing, and AI