Deep-Learning-as-a-Workflow (DLaaW): An Innovative Approach to Enabling Deep Learning in Scientific Workflows

Scientific workflow has become a popular cyberinfrastructure paradigm to accelerate scientific discoveries by enabling scientists to formalize and structure complex scientific processes. With the recent success of deep learning models in many scientific applications, there is a rising need for infrastructure-level support for deep learning technologies in scientific workflow cyberinfrastructures. However, current scientific workflow cyberinfrastructures and GPU-enabled deep learning frameworks are developed separately, neither alone can be a satisfactory choice. In this paper, We propose the Deep-Learning-as-a-Workflow approach in DATAVIEW, which for the first time incorporates native infrastructure level support for GPU-enabled deep learning in a scientific workflow management system and enables the fast training and execution of neural networks as workflows (NNWorkflows) leveraging various types of GPU resource configurations. Our experiments demonstrate the salient usability feature of DATAVIEW in providing seamless infrastructure-level support to both scientific and deep learning workflows in one system, while delivering competitive (better in most cases) learning efficiency compared to the conventional implementations based on Keras.