Startup Anyscale Inc. today introduced the first round-number release of its open-source Ray framework, which is used by engineers at Amazon.com Inc. and other tech giants to build artificial intelligence models.

Anyscale exited stealth mode late last year with more than $20 million in initial funding. Co-founders Robert Nishihara (pictured, left) and Philipp Moritz (right) created Ray as part of their research at University of California, Berkeley. The startup’s founding team also includes Ion Stoica (center), the creator of the popular Apache Spark analytics engine. 

Available under an open-source Apache 2.0 license, Ray eases the task of building large-scale AI models. Large models that are expected to run on hundreds or even thousands of servers need to be designed with a so-called distributed architecture if they are to effectively use so much hardware. However, designing distributed AI architectures by hand is technically complicated, a technical obstacle that Ray addresses by automating key parts of the process for engineers.

The new Ray 1.0 release Anyscale introduced today adds several new features meant to ease development further. The first is support for multitenancy, which will allow data scientists to run multiple AI projects with different technical requirements on a single Ray cluster instead of having to set up a separate deployment for each. Anyscale has also added support for more AI development libraries including the popular PyTorch, Uber Technologies Inc.’s Horovod and more than a half-dozen others.

Another key enhancement is that Ray can now work with  multiple cluster node types. According to Anyscale, if an AI workload requires, say, four graphics cards and 16 central processing units to run, the framework will try and provision the minimal number of servers necessary to meet the demand. That should result in higher infrastructure efficiency. 

“Ray 1.0 signals a substantial investment in the project’s stability, maturity, and production-readiness, and because Ray is used to develop so many other libraries, this release impacts the entire application ecosystem,” said Anyscale co-founder and Chief Executive Robert Nishihara.

In addition to Amazon, Ray has been adopted by engineers at Microsoft Corp., Autodesk Inc. and Intel Corp., among others. The startup paired the announcement of Ray 1.0 today with the news that it has started beta testing its first commercial product, a paid managed version of the framework.

Photo: Anyscale