Zygote.jl VS jetson-inference

If you look at Julia open source projects you'll see that the projects tend to have a lot more contributors than the Python counterparts, even over smaller time periods. A package for defining statistical distributions has had 202 contributors (https://github.com/JuliaStats/Distributions.jl), etc. Julia Base even has had over 1,300 contributors (https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia) which is quite a lot for a core language, and that's mostly because the majority of the core is in Julia itself.

This is one of the things that was noted quite a bit at this SIAM CSE conference, that Julia development tends to have a lot more code reuse than other ecosystems like Python. For example, the various machine learning libraries like Flux.jl and Lux.jl share a lot of layer intrinsics in NNlib.jl (https://github.com/FluxML/NNlib.jl), the same GPU libraries (https://github.com/JuliaGPU/CUDA.jl), the same automatic differentiation library (https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl), and of course the same JIT compiler (Julia itself). These two libraries are far enough apart that people say "Flux is to PyTorch as Lux is to JAX/flax", but while in the Python world those share almost 0 code or implementation, in the Julia world they share >90% of the core internals but have different higher levels APIs.

If one hasn't participated in this space it's a bit hard to fathom how much code reuse goes on and how that is influenced by the design of multiple dispatch. This is one of the reasons there is so much cohesion in the community since it doesn't matter if one person is an ecologist and the other is a financial engineer, you may both be contributing to the same library like Distances.jl just adding a distance function which is then used in thousands of places. With the Python ecosystem you tend to have a lot more "megapackages", PyTorch, SciPy, etc. where the barrier to entry is generally a lot higher (and sometimes requires handling the build systems, fun times). But in the Julia ecosystem you have a lot of core development happening in "small" but central libraries, like Distances.jl or Distributions.jl, which are simple enough for an undergrad to get productive in a week but is then used everywhere (Distributions.jl for example is used in every statistics package, and definitions of prior distributions for Turing.jl's probabilistic programming language, etc.).

I think julia has a lot going for it. I feel like autograd is one of the bigger ones given that it's a language feature basically (https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl for reference). I think the ecosystem is a bit of an uphill battle though.

Also check out https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl which is the AD engine

> There's sadly no performant autodiff system for general purpose Python.

Like there is for general purpose Julia? (https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl)

Thanks again. Like you said it is fun to dream (ask the "Scheme Machine" guys sometime about how they would go about it now), but practically with technology like Julia's Zygote:

https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl

the efficiency of autodiff might be similar to that of an opcode anyway.

So, how did DEC do on the Alpha processor? I always heard good things about it--IIRC it was based on the VAX, but 64 bit. I learned PDP-11 assembler at RPI, during their college program for high school students in about 1984. We hand assembled code and really got to know the architecture.

and make that computable. It seems like line 88 --> 90 of this file in Zygote does that: https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl/blob/master/src/compiler/chainrules.jl

It's super powerful

For example Zygote.jl (https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl) implements reverse mode automatic differentiation, by defining a function that is a generated transformation of the function being differentiated.

Jetson Nano’s are obsolete and no longer supported; but to answer your question, this might be a good place to start.

I’m trying to do the tutorial, where they retrain the neural network to detect fruits (jetson-inference/pytorch-ssd.md at master · dusty-nv/jetson-inference · GitHub 1)

Jetson-Inference is another amazing resource to get started on. This will allow you to try out a number of neural networks (classification, detection, and segmentation) all with your own data or with sample images included in the repo.

Hello! I'm looking for some pre trained image classification models to use on a Jetson Nano. I already know about the model zoo and the pre trained models included in the https://github.com/dusty-nv/jetson-inference repo. For demonstration purposes, however, I need a model trained on small objects from the context of production, ideally nuts, bolts, and similar small objects. Does anyone happen to know a source for this? Thanks a lot!

> They provide some SSD-Mobilenet-v2 here: https://github.com/dusty-nv/jetson-inference

I was aware of that repository but from taking a cursory look at it I had thought dusty was just converting models from PyTorch to TensorRT, like here[0, 1]. Am I missing something?

> I get 140 fps on a Xavier NX

That really is impressive. Holy shit.

[0]: https://github.com/dusty-nv/jetson-inference/blob/master/doc...

[1]: https://github.com/dusty-nv/jetson-inference/issues/896#issu...

If you have a screen and keyboard and mouse plugged into the Nano, I would recommend starting with Hello AI World on https://github.com/dusty-nv/jetson-inference#hello-ai-world

Well, don't get me wrong. I do like my Jetson Nano. For a hobbyist who likes to tinker with machine learning in their spare time it's definitely a product cool and there are quite a few repositories on Github[0, 1] with sample code.

Unfortunately… that's about it. There is little documentation about

- how to build a custom OS image (necessary if you're thinking about using Jetson as part of your own product, i.e. a large-scale deployment). What proprietary drivers and libraries do I need to install? Nvidia basically says, here's a Ubuntu image with the usual GUI, complete driver stack and everything – take it or leave it. Unfortunately, the GUI alone is eating up a lot of the precious CPU and GPU resources, so using that OS image is no option.

- how deployment works on production modules (as opposed to the non-production module in the Developer Kit)

- what production modules are available in the first place ("Please refer to our partners")

- what wifi dongles are compatible (the most recent Jetson Nano comes w/o wifi)

- how to convert your custom models to TensorRT, what you need to pay attention to etc. (The official docs basically say: Have a look at the following nondescript sample code. Good luck.)

- … (I'm sure I'm forgetting many other things that I've struggled with over the past months)

Anyway. It's not that this information isn't out there somewhere in some blog post, some Github repo or some thread on the Nvidia forums[2]. (Though I have yet to find a reliably working wifi dongle…) But it usually takes you days orweeks to find it. From a product which is supposed to be industry-grade I would have expected more.

[0]: https://github.com/dusty-nv/jetson-inference

https://github.com/dusty-nv/jetson-inference#system-setup