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AIStore is a lightweight object storage system with the capability to linearly scale out with each added storage node and a special focus on petascale deep learning.

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AIStore (AIS for short) is a built-from-scratch, lightweight storage stack tailored for AI apps. It's an elastic cluster that can grow and shrink at runtime and can be ad-hoc deployed, with or without Kubernetes, anywhere from a single Linux machine to a bare-metal cluster of any size.

AIS consistently shows balanced I/O distribution and linear scalability across arbitrary numbers of clustered nodes. The ability to scale linearly with each added disk was, and remains, one of the main incentives. Much of the initial design was also driven by the ideas to offload custom dataset transformations (often referred to as ETL). And finally, since AIS is a software system that aggregates Linux machines to provide storage for user data, there's the requirement number one: reliability and data protection.

Features

For easy usage, management, and monitoring, there's also:

$ ais

bucket        etl         help           log              create        dsort        stop         blob-download
object        job         advanced       performance      download      evict        cp           rmo
cluster       auth        storage        remote-cluster   prefetch      get          rmb          wait
config        show        archive        alias            put           ls           start        search

AIS runs natively on Kubernetes and features open format - thus, the freedom to copy or move your data from AIS at any time using the familiar Linux tar(1), scp(1), rsync(1) and similar.

For developers and data scientists, there's also:

For the original AIStore white paper and design philosophy, for introduction to large-scale deep learning and the most recently added features, please see AIStore Overview (where you can also find six alternative ways to work with existing datasets). Videos and animated presentations can be found at videos.

Finally, getting started with AIS takes only a few minutes.

Deployment options

AIS deployment options, as well as intended (development vs. production vs. first-time) usages, are all summarized here.

Since prerequisites boil down to, essentially, having Linux with a disk the deployment options range from all-in-one container to a petascale bare-metal cluster of any size, and from a single VM to multiple racks of high-end servers. But practical use cases require, of course, further consideration and may include:

OptionObjective
Local playgroundAIS developers or first-time users, Linux or Mac OS; to get started, run make kill cli aisloader deploy <<< $'N\nM', where N is a number of targets, M - gateways
Minimal production-ready deploymentThis option utilizes preinstalled docker image and is targeting first-time users or researchers (who could immediately start training their models on smaller datasets)
Easy automated GCP/GKE deploymentDevelopers, first-time users, AI researchers
Large-scale production deploymentRequires Kubernetes and is provided via a separate repository: ais-k8s

Further, there's the capability referred to as global namespace: given HTTP(S) connectivity, AIS clusters can be easily interconnected to "see" each other's datasets. Hence, the idea to start "small" to gradually and incrementally build high-performance shared capacity.

For detailed discussion on supported deployments, please refer to Getting Started.

For performance tuning and preparing AIS nodes for bare-metal deployment, see performance.

Existing datasets

AIStore supports multiple ways to populate itself with existing datasets, including (but not limited to):

The on-demand "way" is maybe the most popular, whereby users just start running their workloads against a remote bucket with AIS cluster positioned as an intermediate fast tier.

But there's more. In v3.22, we introduce blob downloader, a special facility to download very large remote objects (BLOBs). And in v3.23, there's a new capability, dubbed bucket inventory, to list very large S3 buckets fast.

Installing from release binaries

Generally, AIStore (cluster) requires at least some sort of deployment procedure. There are standalone binaries, though, that can be built from source or installed directly from GitHub:

$ ./scripts/install_from_binaries.sh --help

The script installs aisloader and CLI from the most recent, or the previous, GitHub release. For CLI, it'll also enable auto-completions (which is strongly recommended).

PyTorch integration

PyTorch integration is a growing set of datasets (both iterable and map-style), samplers, and dataloaders:

Since AIS natively supports remote backends, you can also use (PyTorch + AIS) to iterate over Amazon S3, GCS and Azure buckets, and more.

Guides and References

License

MIT

Author

Alex Aizman (NVIDIA)