ROCK - Alibaba open source smart body training environment sandbox

What's ROCK?

ROCK (Reinforcement Open Construction Kit) is Alibaba's open source sandbox for intelligence training environment, which solves the problem that intelligence can't be scaled up for training in real environment.ROCK provides highly stable sandbox management service, and each intelligence (Agent) has its own independent safe house, which doesn't interfere with each other, even if one environment crashes, it won't affect other environments. ROCK provides a highly stable sandbox management service, where each Agent has its own "safe house" without interfering with each other, so that even if one environment crashes, it will not affect the other environments. ROCK is equipped with all-round health monitoring, intelligent load balancing, automatic fault recovery and other functions to ensure the stability and efficiency of the training process.ROCK and Ali's previous reinforcement learning (RL) training framework ROLL ROLL is responsible for training the algorithms, while ROCK provides the training environment, allowing developers to seamlessly scale from single-computer experiments to large-scale cluster training.

Features of ROCK

• elasticity scalingRay-based architecture abstracts complex computing clusters into a unified "environment resource pool", automatically scheduling and pulling up thousands of parallel training environments within minutes to meet the demand for massive environments ranging from 1 to 10K.
• programmatic interaction: Provide programmatic Bash interaction capabilities, through the SDK and HTTP API, developers can operate like a local terminal, with hundreds of remote Sandbox in-depth interaction, view files, logs, process status, and even dynamically change environment variables.
• Flexible deploymentThe cloud is a powerful tool that supports "write once, run anywhere", from local independent operation to cloud scale deployment seamlessly, developers in the local development verification, can be directly deployed in the cloud, no need to modify the configuration.
• Extreme StabilityThe Sandbox is designed in accordance with Ali's internal core infrastructure standards, and is characterized by fault isolation, fine resource scheduling, and fast state management. Each Sandbox runs independently, so that the collapse of one environment will not affect the other, and it can be reset in a second by pulling up the reset.
• structural innovation: Decoupling the Agent business logic from the training framework through ModelService reduces maintenance costs and improves compatibility, while focusing expensive GPU resources on the central reasoning service of the training framework, ROCK Sandbox runs on low-cost CPU instances on a large scale, which greatly reduces training costs.

ROCK's core strengths

• Massive parallel trainingIt supports the parallel operation of thousands of training environments to meet the diversified needs from simple tasks to complex multi-intelligence body scenarios, and significantly improves the training efficiency.
• Seamless Scaling and DeploymentThe cloud is a seamless transition from local development to large-scale deployment in the cloud, supporting "write once, run anywhere", which greatly reduces the threshold of development and deployment.
• High stability and reliability: Each training environment runs independently, with fault isolation and second pull-up capability to ensure a stable and reliable training process.
• Deep Framework Synergy: Deep synergy with Ali's reinforcement learning framework ROLL, constituting a complete closed loop of intelligent body training, seamlessly expanding from stand-alone to large-scale cluster training.
• Cost optimization: Significantly reduce training costs through centralized GPU inference services and large-scale CPU instance deployment.
• Programmatic Interaction and Debugging: Provide programmatic Bash interaction capabilities, support for remote debugging and management via SDK and API, to facilitate developers to quickly locate and solve problems.

What is the official website for ROCK

• Github repository:: https://github.com/alibaba/ROCK

Who ROCK is for

• AI researchers and developers: Focusing on areas such as reinforcement learning and intelligent body training, we need an efficient and stable training environment to test and optimize our algorithms.
• Game Development Team: Intelligent NPCs or player agents need to be trained in game development to improve the performance and experience of game AI through massively parallel training.
• Enterprise Data Scientist: Responsible for intelligent decision-making systems, automated process optimization, and other tasks in the enterprise, there is a need to leverage reinforcement learning techniques to improve business efficiency.
• Universities and research institutes: Scholars and students engaged in research related to artificial intelligence and machine learning need flexible and low-cost experimental platforms.
• Cloud service and platform providers: The desire to provide users with reinforcement learning training services requires an underlying framework that is scalable and highly stable.