Company
Date Published
Author
Zhe Zhang
Word count
1855
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

This year's Ray Forward conference highlighted exciting stories of Ray's adoption in China, including hyper-scale applications at Ant Group, production deep learning on Ray at DJI, next generation Ray-based ML Platform at Qihoo, and more. The Ray Community in China has been organizing a "Ray Forward" conference since 2020 as a companion event to Ray Summit. Key observations include the growing number of vertical computing systems, which are becoming increasingly complex, and Ray emerging as an ideal abstraction layer to simplify these complexities. Ant Group used Ray to power their online serving and new use cases such as audio/video processing, while DJI utilized Ray for distributed deep learning in production due to its flexibility and low overhead. Huawei Cloud launched a new framework called Fathom (powered by Ray), which provides seamless development experience on large scale distributed Data + AI problems. Qihoo 360 introduced an ML toolkit Veloce (built on Ray), providing flexible heterogeneous hardware support, rapid development iterations, and stronger cross-stack optimizations than their existing Kubeflow-based system. Byzer integrated SQL data processing, model training, and serving in a flexible, efficient, and scalable way using both Spark and Ray. The conference also showcased the adoption of Ray by companies such as Baihai Tech and Byzer, highlighting its ability to simplify development to deployment flows and provide optimized development pipelines.