The Apache Software Foundation announced that the machine learning library Apache SINGA is now a top-level project.

The project, which started out at the National University of Singapore, trains large-scale machine learning models over a cluster of machines. 

The developers behind the project are currently working on SINGA-lite for deep learning on edge devices with 5G, and SINGA-easy to make AI usable by domain experts who don’t have a deep AI background, according to the foundation. 

“In addition to scalability, during the incubation process, we built multiple versions to improve the project’s usability and efficiency,” said Wei Wang, vice president of Apache SINGA and assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. “Incubating SINGA at the ASF brought opportunities to collaborate, grow our community, standardize the development process and more.”

According to the developers of the project, SINGA is used in applications that span banking, education, finance, healthcare, real estate and software development. 

“It is essential to scale deep learning via distributed computing as deep learning models are typically large and trained over big datasets, which may take hundreds of days using a single GPU,”  said Beng Chin Ooi, distinguished professor of National University of Singapore who initialized the SINGA project.