SUMMARYThe Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a supervised learning algorithm used for recognizing patterns in data. It is a very popular technique in Machine Learning and has been successfully used in applications such as image classification, protein classification, and handwriting recognition. However, the computational complexity of the kernelized version of the algorithm grows quadratically with the number of training examples. To tackle this high computational complexity we have developed a directive-based approach that converts a gradient-ascent based training algorithm for the CPU to an efficient GPU implementation. We compare our GPU-based SVM training algorithm to the standard LibSVM CPU implementation, a highly-optimized GPU-LIBSVM implementation, as well as to a directive-based OpenACC implementation. The results on different handwritten digit classification datasets demonstrate an important speed-up for the current approach when compared to the CPU and OpenACC versions. Furthermore, our solution is almost as fast and sometimes even faster than the highly optimized CUBLAS-based GPU-LIBSVM implementation, without sacrificing the algorithm's accuracy.

Getting scientific software installed correctly and ensuring it performs well has been a ubiquitous problem for several decades now, which is compounded currently by the changing landscape of computational science with the (re‐)emergence of different microprocessor families, and the expansion to additional scientific domains like artificial intelligence and next‐generation sequencing. The European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI) project aims to provide a ready‐to‐use stack of scientific software installations that can be leveraged easily on a variety of platforms, ranging from personal workstations to cloud environments and supercomputer infrastructure, without making compromises with respect to performance. In this article, we provide a detailed overview of the project, highlight potential use cases, and demonstrate that the performance of the provided scientific software installations can be competitive with system‐specific installations.