AWS Neuron vs. Horovod vs. IBM Distributed AI APIs vs. Python Comparison Chart

It supports high-performance training on AWS Trainium-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Trn1 instances. For model deployment, it supports high-performance and low-latency inference on AWS Inferentia-based Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances and AWS Inferentia2-based Amazon EC2 Inf2 instances. With Neuron, you can use popular frameworks, such as TensorFlow and PyTorch, and optimally train and deploy machine learning (ML) models on Amazon EC2 Trn1, Inf1, and Inf2 instances with minimal code changes and without tie-in to vendor-specific solutions. AWS Neuron SDK, which supports Inferentia and Trainium accelerators, is natively integrated with PyTorch and TensorFlow. This integration ensures that you can continue using your existing workflows in these popular frameworks and get started with only a few lines of code changes. For distributed model training, the Neuron SDK supports libraries, such as Megatron-LM and PyTorch Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP).

Distributed AI is a computing paradigm that bypasses the need to move vast amounts of data and provides the ability to analyze data at the source. Distributed AI APIs built by IBM Research is a set of RESTful web services with data and AI algorithms to support AI applications across hybrid cloud, distributed, and edge computing environments. Each Distributed AI API addresses the challenges in enabling AI in distributed and edge environments with APIs. The Distributed AI APIs do not focus on the basic requirements of creating and deploying AI pipelines, for example, model training and model serving. You would use your favorite open-source packages such as TensorFlow or PyTorch. Then, you can containerize your application, including the AI pipeline, and deploy these containers at the distributed locations. In many cases, it’s useful to use a container orchestrator such as Kubernetes or OpenShift operators to automate the deployment process.