A High-Performance Computing Cluster for Distributed Deep Learning: A Practical Case of Weed Classification Using Convolutional Neural Network Models

One of the main concerns in precision agriculture (PA) is the growth of weeds within a crop field. Currently, to prevent the spread of weeds, automatic techniques and computational tools are used to help to identify, classify, and detect the different types of weeds found in agricultural fields. One of the technologies that can help us to process digital information gathered from the agricultural fields is high-performance computing (HPC); this technology has been adopted to carry out projects requiring extra processing and storage in order to execute tasks with a large computational cost. This paper shows the implementation of an HPC cluster (HPCC), in which image processing (IP) and analysis are executed using deep learning (DL) techniques, specifically, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with the VGG16 and InceptionV3 models, to classify different weed species. The results show the great benefits of using high-performance computing clusters in PA, specifically for classifying images. To apply distributed computing within the HPCC, the Keras and Horovod frameworks were used to train the CNN models, obtaining the best time with the InceptionV3 model with a value of 37 min 55.193 s using six HPCC cores, obtaining an accuracy of 0.65 as a result.