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Google Summer of Code 2023 contributor applications open!

Monday, March 20, 2023

Contributor applications for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2023 are now open! Students and open source beginners 18 years and older are welcome to apply during the registration period, which opened March 20th at 18:00 UTC and closes April 4th at 18:00 UTC.

Google Summer of Code is a global online program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. GSoC Contributors work with an open source organization on a 12+ week programming project under the guidance of mentors. GSoC’s mission is centered around bringing new contributors into open source communities through mentorship and collaboration.

Since 2005, GSoC has welcomed new developers into the open source community every year. The GSoC program has brought together over 19,000 contributors from 112 countries and 18,000 mentors from 800+ open source organizations.

2023 will be the 19th consecutive year hosting Google Summer of Code. We are keeping the big changes we made leading into the 2022 program, with one adjustment around eligibility described below:

  • Increased flexibility in project lengths (10-22 weeks, not a set 12 weeks for everyone).
  • Choice of project time commitment (medium at ~175 hours or large at ~350 hours)
  • For 2023, we are expanding the program to be open to students and beginners in open source software development.

We invite students and beginners in open source to check out Google Summer of Code. Now that applications are open, please keep a few helpful tips in mind:

Interested contributors may register and submit project proposals on the GSoC site from now until Tuesday, April 4th at 18:00 UTC.

Best of luck to all our applicants!

By Stephanie Taylor, Program Manager, and Perry Burnham, Associate Program Manager for the Google Open Source Programs Office

Getting To SLSA Level 2 with Tekton and Tekton Chains

Thursday, March 9, 2023

Overview

As application developers, we achieve amazing results quickly by leveraging a rich ecosystem of freely available libraries, modules and frameworks that provide ready-to-use capabilities and abstract away from underlying complexity. This is so foundational to how we work that we'll nonchalantly build and publish an app that pulls in hundreds of dependencies without even thinking about it. And it's only fairly recently, in the wake of some very high profile and high impact compromises, that we've started to reckon with the fact that this wonderful ecosystem is also a security quagmire. All of the dependencies that feed into your build make up your software supply chain, and supply chains need to be secured. In this post, we'll show how an increasingly popular open source CI/CD system, Tekton, implements the OpenSSF SLSA framework to provide you with supply chain security guarantees.

Software Supply Chain Security

A software supply chain is anything that goes into or affects your code from development, through your CI/CD pipeline, until it gets deployed into production. Increasingly, the software supply chain has become a vector for attacks. The recent Log4j, SolarWinds, Kaseya, and Codecov hacks highlight vulnerable surface areas exposed by an insecure software supply chain.

Between 2020 and 2021, there has been a 650% Surge in OSS supply chain attacks, and Gartner projects that 45% of organizations worldwide will have experienced software supply chain attacks by 2025.

Supply Chains Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA)

The Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) framework is a check-list of controls to prevent tampering, improve integrity, and increase security in the packages and infrastructure used by projects, businesses or enterprises. SLSA formalizes criteria around software supply chain integrity to help the industry and open source ecosystem secure the software development life cycle at all stages.

As part of the framework, SLSA has multiple levels of assurances. These levels contain industry-recognized best practices to create four levels of increasing assurance.

Supply-Chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) Levels 1 through 4

SLSA provides a set of requirements that needs to be met for an artifact to be considered for a particular SLSA level.

Tekton + Tekton Chains

Tekton is a powerful and flexible, open source, cloud-native framework for creating CI/CD systems, allowing developers to build, test, and deploy across cloud providers and on-premise systems. Tekton consists of several subprojects which are relevant to SLSA:

  • Pipelines: A system that allows one to define a pipeline of CI/CD tasks and have it be orchestrated by the Tekton controller.
  • Chains: A standalone system which observes Pipelines and generates provenance for the artifacts built by Pipelines.

Tekton build processes are defined as tasks and pipelines. A Task is a collection of Steps that are defined and arranged in a specific order of execution as part of a continuous integration flow.

A Pipeline is a collection of Tasks defined and arranged in a specific order of execution as part of a continuous integration flow.

A TaskRun is an instantiation of a Task with specific inputs, outputs and execution parameters while a PipelineRun is an instantiation of a Pipeline.

A Task/Pipeline can define a set of Results. TaskRuns and PipelineRuns create Results as defined in the Task/Pipeline. Results are used to communicate to Tekton Chains run specifics like the uri and the digest of the built artifact.

Tasks, Pipelines, TaskRuns and PipelineRuns are defined through yaml files. The entire build is defined by the set of yaml files which define Tekton Tasks, Pipelines, TaskRuns and PipelineRuns. These yaml files can be checked in as code and run directly from the code repository.

Getting to SLSA L1: Automation + Provenance

For an artifact to be SLSA L1 compliant it should satisfy the following:

  1. Scripted build: All build steps are fully defined in some sort of “build script”. The only manual command, if any, is to invoke the build script.
  2. Provenance: The provenance is available to the consumer in a format that the consumer accepts. The format SHOULD be in-toto SLSA Provenance, but another format MAY be used if both producer and consumer agree and it meets all the other requirements.

Tekton Tasks, TaskRuns, Pipelines and PipelineRuns are specified in yaml files. These yaml files can be considered as scripts and can even be checked in into a code repository. These could also be run from code repositories. Tekton Chains provides a way to generate provenance in in-toto SLSA format. As such, Tekton can easily make builds which satisfy the SLSA L1 requirements.

Let's follow through with an example, which has the following files:

  • setup.sh: Sets up Google cloud to run an instance of the build specified in pipeline_run.yaml. It also installs Tekton Pipeline and Tekton Chains. In the production environment, this would be run once to set up the environment and all builds would use the same environment.
  • pipeline_run.yaml: This file is the actual build file that is run by Tekton Pipelines. The build here first clones a Github repo, builds the container specified in the source and uploads it to a Docker repository.
A workflow diagram depicting how Tekton can be used to acheive SLSA L2 requirements
The build script pipeline.yaml is the definition of the script while pipeline_run.yaml defines an instance of the build. It provides instance specific parameters for the build. Though both pipeline_run.yaml and pipeline.yaml are in source control for this example, the build definition is in pipeline.yaml and as such pipeline.yaml being in source control would satisfy the requirement of a source controlled build script.

kubectl create -f

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/tekton-slsa-demo/main/pipeline_run.yaml

Tekton Chains for Provenance Generation

Provenance is metadata about how an artifact was built, including the build process, top-level source, and dependencies. Knowing the provenance allows software consumers to make risk-based security decisions.

Tekton Chains observes TaskRuns and PipelineRuns in a Kubernetes cluster. Once the runs are done, Chains collects information (provenance) about the Run or the build process and the artifact created by the Run. It signs the provenance and stores the signed provenance. The provenance generated for the example build complies to the SLSA provenance schema and is explained further below.

Note that every step of the build has been recorded and can be reconstructed by following the steps in the provenance.

Next Steps: CI/CD @ SLSA L2

SLSA requires that for a build to be SLSA L2 compliant it should satisfy the following

  1. Every change to the source is tracked in a version control system
  2. All build steps were fully defined in some sort of “build script”. The only manual command, if any, was to invoke the build script.
  3. All build steps ran using some build service, not on a developer’s workstation.
  4. The provenance is available to the consumer in a format that the consumer accepts. The format SHOULD be in-toto SLSA Provenance, but another format MAY be used if both producer and consumer agree and it meets all the other requirements.
  5. The provenance’s authenticity and integrity can be verified by the consumer. This SHOULD be through a digital signature from a private key accessible only to the service generating the provenance.
  6. The data in the provenance MUST be obtained from the build service (either because the generator is the build service or because the provenance generator reads the data directly from the build service). Regular users of the service MUST NOT be able to inject or alter the contents.

Every change to the source is tracked in a version control system

Tekton does not explicitly enforce that the source is version controlled. Tekton users can enforce that the source is version controlled by writing an appropriate Task which will check for version control. The source should also be communicated by Tekton Pipelines to Tekton Chains through a result variable that is suffixed with -ARTIFACT_INPUTS.

All build steps were fully defined in some sort of “build script”. The only manual command, if any, was to invoke the build script.

This is a requirement for SLSA L1 as well and as explained above, Tekton provides a way to script the build through yaml files. The build is defined as a Pipeline (or Task) which can be saved as a yaml file and submitted into source control. The build instance which is defined as a PipelineRun (or TaskRun) can resolve the Pipeline (or Task) yaml from source control and use it for the current instance of the build.

All build steps ran using some build service, not on a developer’s workstation.

Tekton can be hosted on a cloud provider or on a hosted Kubernetes cluster and run as a build service. The build scripts can be submitted into source control (like GitHub) and Tekton can read the scripts directly from source control.

Provenance should be available

This is a requirement for SLSA L1 and as explained above Tekton Chains provides build provenance.

Provenance should be signed and Authenticated

As can be seen in the example, Tekton Chains creates and signs the build provenance. The signature can be verified anytime to ensure that the provenance has not been tampered after the build and the provenance is really created by the build process that claims to have built it. The signing is done according to the SLSA specification using the DSSE format.

Tekton Chains creates the provenance and signs it using a secure private key. Chains then uploads the signed provenance to a user-specified location, one of which is Google Cloud’s Container Analysis, which implements the open standard Grafeas API for storing provenance.

An annotated block of code depicting how Tekton Chains create provenance and signs it

Provenance should be generated by a Service

Note that the provenance in the example is generated by the Tekton Chains service and it cannot be modified after it has been generated, which is guaranteed by the signature.

SLSA requirements for the contents of the provenance, for the build to be considered L2.

All images below are extracted from the provenance of the example build. These can be verified by re-running the example.

1. Identifies artifact: The provenance MUST identify the output artifact via at least one cryptographic hash. The subject field in the SLSA provenance captures the location of the built artifact and the cryptographic hash associated with it. To be able to capture the artifact, Tekton Pipelines should populate the result variable -ARTIFACT_OUTPUTS with the location and the digest of the artifact.
A block of code extracted from the provenance of the example build
2. Identifies builder: The provenance identifies the entity that performed the build and generated the provenance. The builder.id field captures the builder that built the artifact.
A block of code extracted from the provenance of the example build
3. Identifies build instructions: The provenance identifies the top-level instructions used to execute the build. In our example, the build script is in source control. Recording the repo, the path in the repo and the commit hash will uniquely identify the build instructions used to build the artifact.
A block of code extracted from the provenance of the example build
4. Identifies source code: The provenance identifies the repository origin(s) for the source code used in the build. The materials field records all the dependencies used to build the artifact, one of which is the source code. In the example the source used is in a GitHub repo, and as such the repo name and the commit hash will uniquely identify the source code.
A block of code extracted from the provenance of the example build

Conclusion

SLSA aims to secure the software supply chain by providing guidelines on how the software build should be done. Tekton pipelines and Tekton chains implement those guidelines and help in securing the software supply chain.

By Prakash Jagatheesan (team: TektonCD), Brandon Lum (team: GOSST)

OpenXLA is available now to accelerate and simplify machine learning

Wednesday, March 8, 2023

ML development and deployment today suffer from fragmented and siloed infrastructure that can differ by framework, hardware, and use case. Such fragmentation restrains developer velocity and imposes barriers to model portability, efficiency, and productionization. 

Today, we’re taking a significant step towards eliminating these barriers by making the OpenXLA Project, including the XLA, StableHLO, and IREE repositories, available for use and contribution.

OpenXLA is an open source ML compiler ecosystem co-developed by AI/ML industry leaders including Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, AMD, Apple, Arm, Cerebras, Google, Graphcore, Hugging Face, Intel, Meta, and NVIDIA. It enables developers to compile and optimize models from all leading ML frameworks for efficient training and serving on a wide variety of hardware. Developers using OpenXLA will see significant improvements in training time, throughput, serving latency, and, ultimately, time-to-market and compute costs.

Start accelerating your workloads with OpenXLA on GitHub.

The Challenges with ML Infrastructure Today

Development teams across numerous industries are using ML to tackle complex real-world challenges, such as prediction and prevention of disease, personalized learning experiences, and black hole physics.

As model parameter counts grow exponentially and compute for deep learning models doubles every six months, developers seek maximum performance and utilization of their infrastructure. Teams are leveraging a wider array of hardware from power-efficient ML ASICs in the datacenter to edge processors that can deliver more responsive AI experiences. These hardware devices have bespoke software libraries with unique algorithms and primitives.

However, without a common compiler to bridge these diverse hardware devices to the multiple frameworks in use today (e.g. TensorFlow, PyTorch), significant effort is required to run ML efficiently; developers must manually optimize model operations for each hardware target. This means using bespoke software libraries or writing device-specific code, which requires domain expertise. The result is isolated, non-generalizable paths across frameworks and hardware that are costly to maintain, promote vendor lock-in, and slow progress for ML developers.

Our Solution and Goals

The OpenXLA Project provides a state-of-the-art ML compiler that can scale amidst the complexity of ML infrastructure. Its core pillars are performance, scalability, portability, flexibility, and extensibility for users. With OpenXLA, we aspire to realize the real-world potential of AI by accelerating its development and delivery.

Our goals are to:
  • Make it easy for developers to compile and optimize any model in their preferred framework, for a wide range of hardware through (1) a unified compiler API that any framework can target (2) pluggable device-specific back-ends and optimizations.
  • Deliver industry-leading performance for current and emerging models that (1) scales across multiple hosts and accelerators (2) satisfies the constraints of edge deployments (3) generalizes to novel model architectures of the future.
  • Build a layered and extensible ML compiler platform that provides developers with (1) MLIR-based components that are reconfigurable for their unique use cases (2) plug-in points for hardware-specific customization of the compilation flow.

A Community of AI/ML Leaders

The challenges we face in ML infrastructure today are immense and no single organization can effectively resolve them alone. The OpenXLA community brings together developers and industry leaders operating at different levels of the AI stack, from frameworks to compilers, runtimes, and silicon, and is thus well suited to address the fragmentation we see across the ML landscape.

As an open source project, we’re guided by the following set of principles:
  • Equal footing: Individuals contribute on equal footing regardless of their affiliation. Technical leaders are those who contribute the most time and energy.
  • Culture of respect: All members are expected to uphold project values and code of conduct, regardless of their position in the community.
  • Scalable, efficient governance: Small groups make consensus-based decisions, with clear but rarely-used paths for escalation.
  • Transparency: All decisions and rationale should be legible to the public community.

Performance, Scale, and Portability: Leveraging the OpenXLA Ecosystem

OpenXLA eliminates barriers for ML developers via a modular toolchain that is supported by all leading frameworks through a common compiler interface, leverages standardized model representations that are portable, and provides a domain-specific compiler with powerful target-independent and hardware-specific optimizations. This toolchain includes XLA, StableHLO, and IREE, all of which leverage MLIR: a compiler infrastructure that enables machine learning models to be consistently represented, optimized and executed on hardware.

Flow chart depicting high-level OpenXLA compilation flow and architecture showing depicted optimizations, frameworks and hardware targets
High-level OpenXLA compilation flow and architecture. Depicted optimizations, frameworks and hardware targets represent a select portion of what is available to developers through OpenXLA.

Here are some of the key benefits that OpenXLA provides:

Spectrum of ML Use Cases

Usage of OpenXLA today spans the gamut of ML use cases. This includes full-scale training of models like DeepMind’s AlphaFold, GPT2 and Swin Transformer on Alibaba Cloud, and multi-modal LLMs for Amazon.com. Users like Waymo leverage OpenXLA for on-vehicle, real-time inference. In addition, OpenXLA is being used to optimize serving of Stable Diffusion on AMD RDNA™ 3-equipped local machines.

Optimal Performance, Out of the Box

OpenXLA makes it easy for developers to speed up model performance without needing to write device-specific code. It features whole-model optimizations including simplification of algebraic expressions, optimization of in-memory data layout, and improved scheduling for reduced peak memory use and communication overhead. Advanced operator fusion and kernel generation help improve device utilization and reduce memory bandwidth requirements.

Scale Workloads With Minimal Effort

Developing efficient parallelization algorithms is time-consuming and requires expertise. With features like GSPMD, developers only need to annotate a subset of critical tensors that the compiler can then use to automatically generate a parallelized computation. This removes much of the work required to partition and efficiently parallelize models across multiple hardware hosts and accelerators.

Portability and Optionality

OpenXLA provides out-of-the-box support for a multitude of hardware devices including AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, x86 CPU and Arm architectures, as well as ML accelerators like Google TPUs, AWS Trainium and Inferentia, Graphcore IPUs, Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine, and many more. OpenXLA additionally supports TensorFlow, PyTorch, and JAX via StableHLO, a portability layer that serves as OpenXLA's input format.

Flexibility

OpenXLA gives users the flexibility to manually tune hotspots in their models. Extension mechanisms such as Custom-call enable users to write deep learning primitives with CUDA, HIP, SYCL, Triton and other kernel languages so they can take full advantage of hardware features.

StableHLO

StableHLO, a portability layer between ML frameworks and ML compilers, is an operation set for high-level operations (HLO) that supports dynamism, quantization, and sparsity. Furthermore, it can be serialized into MLIR bytecode to provide compatibility guarantees. All major ML frameworks (JAX, PyTorch, TensorFlow) can produce StableHLO. Through 2023, we plan to collaborate closely with the PyTorch team to enable an integration to the recent PyTorch 2.0 release.

We’re excited for developers to get their hands on these features and many more that will significantly accelerate and simplify their ML workflows.

Moving Forward Together

The OpenXLA Project is being built by a collaborative community, and we're excited to help developers extend and use it to address the gaps and opportunities we see in the ML industry today. Get started with OpenXLA today on GitHub and sign up for our mailing list here for product and community announcements. You can follow us on Twitter: @OpenXLA

Member Quotes

Here’s what our collaborators are saying about OpenXLA:

Alibaba

“At Alibaba, OpenXLA is leveraged by Elastic GPU Service customers for training and serving of large PyTorch models. We’ve seen significant performance improvements for customers using OpenXLA, notably speed-ups of 72% for GPT2 and 88% for Swin Transformer on NVIDIA GPUs. We're proud to be a founding member of the OpenXLA Project and work with the open-source community to develop an advanced ML compiler that delivers superior performance and user experience for Alibaba Cloud customers.” – Yangqing Jia, VP, AI and Data Analytics, Alibaba

AWS

“We're excited to be a founding member of the OpenXLA Project, which will democratize access to performant, scalable, and extensible AI infrastructure as well as further collaboration within the open source community to drive innovation. At AWS, our customers scale their generative AI applications on AWS Trainium and Inferentia and our Neuron SDK relies on XLA to optimize ML models for high performance and best in class performance per watt. With a robust OpenXLA ecosystem, developers can continue innovating and delivering great performance with a sustainable ML infrastructure, and know that their code is portable to use on their choice of hardware.” – Nafea Bshara, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer, AWS

AMD

“We are excited about the future direction of OpenXLA on the broad family of AMD devices (CPUs, GPUs, AIE) and are proud to be part of this community. We value projects with open governance, flexible and broad applicability, cutting edge features and top-notch performance and are looking forward to the continued collaboration to expand open source ecosystem for ML developers.”  – Alan Lee, Corporate Vice President, Software Development, AMD

Arm

“The OpenXLA Project marks an important milestone on the path to simplifying ML software development. We are fully supportive of the OpenXLA mission and look forward to leveraging the OpenXLA stability and standardization across the Arm® Neoverse™ hardware and software roadmaps.” – Peter Greenhalgh, vice president of technology and fellow, Arm.

Cerebras

“At Cerebras, we build AI accelerators that are designed to make training even the largest AI models quick and easy. Our systems and software meet users where they are -- enabling rapid development, scaling, and iteration using standard ML frameworks without change. OpenXLA helps extend our user reach and accelerated time to solution by providing the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine with a common interface to higher level ML frameworks. We are tremendously excited to see the OpenXLA ecosystem available for even broader community engagement, contribution, and use on GitHub.” – Andy Hock, VP and Head of Product, Cerebras Systems

Google

“Open-source software gives everyone the opportunity to help create breakthroughs in AI. At Google, we’re collaborating on the OpenXLA Project to further our commitment to open source and foster adoption of AI tooling that raises the standard for ML performance, addresses incompatibilities between frameworks and hardware, and is reconfigurable to address developers’ tailored use cases. We’re excited to develop these tools with the OpenXLA community so that developers can drive advancements across many different layers of the AI stack.” – Jeff Dean, Senior Fellow and SVP, Google Research and AI

Graphcore

“Our IPU compiler pipeline has used XLA since it was made public. Thanks to XLA's platform independence and stability, it provides an ideal frontend for bringing up novel silicon. XLA’s flexibility has allowed us to expose our IPU’s novel hardware features and achieve state of the art performance with multiple frameworks. Millions of queries a day are served by systems running code compiled by XLA. We are excited by the direction of OpenXLA and hope to continue contributing to the open source project. We believe that it will form a core component in the future of AI/ML.” – David Norman, Director of Software Design, Graphcore

Hugging Face

“Making it easy to run any model efficiently on any hardware is a deep technical challenge, and an important goal for our mission to democratize good machine learning. At Hugging Face, we enabled XLA for TensorFlow text generation models and achieved speed-ups of ~100x. Moreover, we collaborate closely with engineering teams at Intel, AWS, Habana, Graphcore, AMD, Qualcomm and Google, building open source bridges between frameworks and each silicon, to offer out of the box efficiency to end users through our Optimum library. OpenXLA promises standardized building blocks upon which we can build much needed interoperability, and we can't wait to follow and contribute!” – Morgan Funtowicz, Head of Machine Learning Optimization, Hugging Face

Intel

“At Intel, we believe in open, democratized access to AI. Intel CPUs, GPUs, Habana Gaudi accelerators, and oneAPI-powered AI software including OpenVINO, drive ML workloads everywhere from exascale supercomputers to major cloud deployments. Together with other OpenXLA members, we seek to support standards-based, componentized ML compiler tools that drive innovation across multiple frameworks and hardware environments to accelerate world-changing science and research.” – Greg Lavender, Intel SVP, CTO & GM of Software & Advanced Technology Group

Meta

“In research, at Meta AI, we have been using XLA, a core technology of the OpenXLA project, to enable PyTorch models for Cloud TPUs and were able to achieve significant performance improvements on important projects. We believe that open source accelerates the pace of innovation in the world, and are excited to be a part of the OpenXLA Project.” – Soumith Chintala, Lead Maintainer, PyTorch

NVIDIA

“As a founding member of the OpenXLA Project, NVIDIA is looking forward to collaborating on AI/ML advancements with the OpenXLA community and are positive that with wider engagement and adoption of OpenXLA, ML developers will be empowered with state-of-the-art AI infrastructure.” – Roger Bringmann, VP, Compiler Software, NVIDIA.

Acknowledgements

Abhishek Ratna, Allen Hutchison, Aman Verma, Amber Huffman, Andrew Leaver, Ashok Bhat, Chalana Bezawada, Chandan Damannagari, Chris Leary, Christian Sigg, Cormac Brick, David Dunleavy, David Huntsperger, David Majnemer, Elisa Garcia Anzano, Elizabeth Howard, Eugene Burmako, Gadi Hutt, Geeta Chauhan, Geoffrey Martin-Noble, George Karpenkov, Ian Chan, Jacinda Mein, Jacques Pienaar, Jake Hall, Jake Harmon, Jason Furmanek, Julian Walker, Kulin Seth, Kanglan Tang, Kuy Mainwaring, Magnus Hyttsten, Mahesh Balasubramanian, Mehdi Amini, Michael Hudgins, Milad Mohammadi, Navid Khajouei, Paul Baumstarck, Peter Hawkins, Puneith Kaul, Rich Heaton, Robert Hundt, Roman Dzhabarov, Rostam Dinyari, Scott Kulchycki, Scott Main, Scott Todd, Shantu Roy, Shauheen Zahirazami, Stella Laurenzo, Stephan Herhut, Thea Lamkin, Tomás Longeri, Tres Popp, Vartika Singh, Vinod Grover, Will Constable, and Zac Mustin.

By James Rubin, Product Manager, Machine Learning

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