Productivity from day one on supercomputers that leverage new technologies requires significant preparation. An institution that procures a novel system architecture often lacks sufficient institutional knowledge and skills to prepare for it. Thus, the "Center of Excellence" (CoE) concept has emerged to prepare for systems such as Summit and Sierra, currently the top two systems in the Top 500. This paper documents CoE experiences that prepared a workload of diverse applications and math libraries for a heterogeneous system. We describe our approach to this preparation, including our management and execution strategies, and detail our experiences with and reasons for using different programming approaches. Our early science and performance results show that the project enabled significant early seismic science with up to a l4X throughput increase over Cori. In addition to our successes, we discuss our challenges and failures so others may benefit from our experience.

Detecting actions in videos requires understanding the temporal relationships among frames. Typical action recognition approaches rely on optical flow estimation methods to convey temporal information to a CNN. Recent studies employ 3D convolutions in addition to optical flow to process the temporal information. While these models achieve slightly better results than two-stream 2D convolutional approaches, they are significantly more complex, requiring more data and time to be trained. We propose an efficient, adaptive batch size distributed training algorithm with customized optimizations for training the two 2D streams. We introduce a new 2D convolutional temporal stream that is trained end-to-end with a neural network. The flexibility to freeze some network layers from training in this temporal stream brings the possibility of ensemble learning with more than one temporal streams. Our architecture that combines three streams achieves the highest accuracies as we know of on UCF101 and HMDB51 by systems that do not pretrain on much larger datasets (e.g., Kinetics). We achieve these results while keeping our spatial and temporal streams 4.67x faster to train than the 3D convolution approaches.

Due to the additional temporal dimension, large-scale video action recognition is even more challenging than image recognition and typically takes days to train on modern GPUs even for modest-sized datasets. We propose algorithms and techniques to accelerate training of deep neural networks for action recognition on a cluster of GPUs. In terms of convergence and scaling, our distributed training algorithm with adaptive batch size is provably superior to popular asynchronous stochastic gradient descent algorithms. The convergence analysis of our algorithm shows it is possible to reduce communication cost and at the same time minimize the number of iterations needed for convergence. We customize the Adam optimizer for our distributed algorithm to improve efficiency. In addition, we employ transfer-learning to further reduce training time while improving validation accuracy. Compared with the base-line single-GPU stochastic gradient descent implementation of the two-stream training approach, our implementation achieves super-linear speedups on 16 GPUs while improving validation accuracy. For the UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets, the validation accuracies achieved are 93.1% and 67.9% respectively. As far as we know, these are the highest accuracies achieved with the two-stream approach that does not involve computationally expensive 3D convolutions or pretraining on much larger datasets.

Image annotation, or prediction of multiple tags for an image, is a challenging task. Most current algorithms are based on large sets of handcrafted features. Deep convolutional neural networks have recently outperformed humans in image classification, and these networks can be used to extract features highly predictive of an image's tags. In this study, we analyze semantic information in features derived from two pre-trained deep network classifiers by evaluating their performance in nearest neighbor-based approaches to tag prediction. We generally exceed performance of the manual features when using the deep features. We also find complementary information in the manual and deep features when used in combination for image annotation.

With increasing understanding and availability of nuclear technologies, and increasing persuasion of nuclear technologies by several new countries, it is increasingly becoming important to monitor the nuclear proliferation activities. There is a great need for developing technologies to automatically or semi-automatically detect nuclear proliferation activities using remote sensing. Images acquired from earth observation satellites is an important source of information in detecting proliferation activities. High-resolution remote sensing images are highly useful in verifying the correctness, as well as completeness of any nuclear program. DOE national laboratories are interested in detecting nuclear proliferation by developing advanced geospatial image mining algorithms. In this paper we describe the current understanding of geospatial image mining techniques and enumerate key gaps and identify future research needs in the context of nuclear proliferation.