BigDL runs natively on Apache Spark, and because Qubole offers a greatly enhanced and optimized Spark as a service, it makes for a perfect deployment platform. In this Part 1 of a two-part series, you will learn how to get started with distributed Deep Learning library BigDL on Qubole. By the end, you will have BigDL installed on a Spark cluster with a distributed Deep Learning library readily available for you to use in your Deep Learning applications running on Qubole. In Part 2, you will learn how to write a Deep Learning application on Qubole that uses BigDL to identify handwritten digits (0 to 9) using a LeNet-5 (Convolutional Neural Networks) model that you will train and validate using MNIST database. Before we get started, here’s some introduction and background on the technologies involved. What is Deep Learning? Deep learning is a form of Machine Learning that uses a model of computing very much inspired by structure of the brain. It is a kind of Machine Learning that allows computers to improve with data and achieve great flexibility by learning to represent the world as a nested hierarchy of concepts. In early talks on Deep Learning, Andrew Ng described it […]