I'm looking forward to a review of the major systems available by someone who has a clue (i.e. not me). The investment to learn one of these is great enough that it will be worth some time invested to understand what each can do.
And, if I recall, MKL is included in Microsoft R Open (previously, Revolution R Open). At least, that's what the instructions here[1] lead me to believe.
Thanks for this, I personally have a license for MKL due to a licensed Intel C++ compiler and it really does a good job. I feel that Intel should do more to get MKL out in the open and more in use by the Open Source community. For instance I would love to have access to their FFT code so I could optimize it for my specific use case, but right now things are a black box. Very excited about CNTK btw, releasing a fully cooked multi machine distributed framework is just awesome.
That's good news. The requirement to purchase the Intel C compiler and tools like MKL before programming their processors efficiently is IMO one of the chief reasons why NVIDIA is kicking them to the curb here with 6.6 TFLOP $1,000 consumer GPUs that come with an enormous toolkit of free candy, including a DNN kernel library that plugs into all the important frameworks.
Compare and contrast with ~1 TFLOP ~$7,000 Xeon CPUs.
I have brought this up with multiple Intel engineers and for the most part they nod and agree. Then they tell me that there's no way Intel would ever start doing things like NVIDIA does here. And then I nod and tell them why I continue to bet on NVIDIA for the immediate future, sigh...
There's a joke that says those that hate Windows use Linux, and those that love unix use BSD.
I think this recent open source push by microsoft is depending on the truth of that statement. I think they're working under the assumption that the recent push of developers using Linux has more to do with those developers wanting to use a superior open source environment than preferring Unix/Linux as an operating system.
All of their open source stuff is really easy to use, IFF you're also using all their other open source software and Visual Studio.
If you're the type of developer who is only using Linux because it has the least path of resistance to using open source libraries and software, they're making good progress towards getting you back into a microsoft ecosystem.
If you're the type of developer who likes the free software philosophy, they're not trying to grab you, because they feel that's not a sizable portion of the people using Linux.
I don't like Windows because I find it awkward to use, and the UI changes between major releases seem mostly gratuitous. I don't really hate it on general principles, i.e. because it's not free/open.
[1]: http://systemml.apache.org/
[2]: https://singa.incubator.apache.org/
[3]: http://mahout.apache.org/
[4]: https://samoa.incubator.apache.org/