Preprocessing - Amazon Deep Learning AMIs
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Preprocessing

Data preprocessing through transformations or augmentations can often be a CPU-bound process, and this can be the bottleneck in your overall pipeline. Frameworks have built-in operators for image processing, but DALI (Data Augmentation Library) demonstrates improved performance over frameworks’ built-in options.

  • NVIDIA Data Augmentation Library (DALI): DALI offloads data augmentation to the GPU. It is not preinstalled on the DLAMI, but you can access it by installing it or loading a supported framework container on your DLAMI or other Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instance. Refer to the DALI project page on the NVIDIA website for details. For an example use-case and to download code samples, see the SageMaker Preprocessing Training Performance sample.

  • nvJPEG: a GPU-accelerated JPEG decoder library for C programmers. It supports decoding single images or batches as well as subsequent transformation operations that are common in deep learning. nvJPEG comes built-in with DALI, or you can download from the NVIDIA website's nvjpeg page and use it separately.

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