Machine learning and deep learning environment setup guide

The Databricks Runtime for Machine Learning (Databricks Runtime ML) is a ready-to-go environment optimized for machine learning and data science. Databricks Runtime ML includes many external libraries, including TensorFlow, PyTorch, Horovod, scikit-learn and XGBoost, and provides extensions to improve performance, including GPU acceleration in XGBoost, distributed deep learning using HorovodRunner, and model checkpointing using a Databricks File System (DBFS) FUSE mount.

To use Databricks Runtime ML, select the ML version of the runtime when you create your cluster.

Install additional libraries

You can install additional libraries to create a custom environment for your notebook or cluster.

• To make a library available for all notebooks running on a cluster, create a cluster library. You can also use an init script to install libraries on clusters upon creation.
• To install a library that is available only to a specific notebook session, use Notebook-scoped Python libraries.

Create GPU-enabled clusters

You can create GPU-enabled clusters to accelerate deep learning tasks. For information about creating GPU-enabled Databricks clusters, see GPU-enabled clusters. Databricks Runtime ML includes GPU hardware drivers and NVIDIA libraries such as CUDA.