Microsoft's Cognitive Toolkit or CNTK is an open source framework for building Deep Learning models. This relatively new framework has been gaining traction so we decided to make sure Valohai supports it well. One of the benefits over competing frameworks has been CNTK’s ground up support for multi-node, multi-GPU training, something that for instance TensorFlow has been struggling to tackle well. If you are doing work on really large datasets, you should maybe give it a try.

We built a simple example to see how to go about building Deep Learning models using Valohai and CNTK. Here is a link to the example repository: https://github.com/valohai/cntk-example

Usage does not differ much from how you’d use other similar frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch or Caffe on Valohai. It’s surprisingly simple to try if you want to try CNTK out in your projects. The required Docker images have been cached and made available as can be easily seen from the example!

Let us know what you think of CNTK and why you would want to use it in your next project!