Notes

To keep the code samples as simple as possible, all examples use the MNIST dataset for training a Convolutional Neural Network on the hand-written digit classification problem. Furthermore, we decided to take code samples from the official models/examples repositories maintained by the respective framework developers, as these are the same samples one uses when getting started with the framework.

However, the original examples are designed to automatically download the required dataset in a framework-defined directory. This is not a feasible option when working with supercomputers as compute nodes do not have access to the Internet. Therefore, the samples have been slightly modified to load data from this datasets directory. It contains the MNIST dataset in different formats because samples for different frameworks expect the dataset in a different format.

It is possible to set the DL_TEST_DATA_HOME environment variable to point to a different directory, however, the contents of that directory must contain a recursive copy of the mnist sub-directory as available here.