Popular ML techniques like Reinforcement learning (RL) and Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) require a variety of computational patterns for data processing, simulation (e.g., game engines), model search, training, and serving, and other tasks. Few frameworks efficiently support all these patterns, especially when scaling to clusters.

Ray is an open-source, distributed framework from U.C. Berkeley’s RISELab that easily scales applications from a laptop to a cluster. It was created to address the needs of reinforcement learning and hyperparameter tuning, in particular, but it is broadly applicable for almost any distributed Python-based application, with support for other languages forthcoming.

I'll explain the problems Ray solves and how Ray works. Then I'll discuss RLlib and Tune, the RL and HPO systems implemented with Ray. You'll learn when to use Ray versus alternatives, and how to adopt it for your projects.