README.md

# Introduction 

NNI (Neural Network Intelligence) is a toolkit to help users running automated machine learning experiments. 
The tool dispatches and runs trial jobs that generated by tuning algorithms to search the best neural architecture and/or hyper-parameters at different environments (e.g. local, remote servers and cloud).

```
            AutoML experiment                                 Training Services
┌────────┐        ┌────────────────────────┐                  ┌────────────────┐
│ nnictl │ ─────> │  nni_manager           │                  │ Local Machine  │
└────────┘        │    sdk/tuner           │                  └────────────────┘
                  │      hyperopt_tuner    │
                  │      evolution_tuner   │    trial jobs    ┌────────────────┐
                  │      ...               │     ────────>    │ Remote Servers │          
                  ├────────────────────────┤                  └────────────────┘
                  │  trial job source code │                  
                  │    sdk/annotation      │                  ┌────────────────┐
                  ├────────────────────────┤                  │ Yarn,K8s,      │
                  │  nni_board             │                  │ ...            │
                  └────────────────────────┘                  └────────────────┘
```
## **Who should consider using NNI**
* You want to try different AutoML algorithms for your training code (model) at local
* You want to run AutoML trial jobs in different environments to speed up search (e.g. remote servers and cloud)
* As a researcher and data scientist, you want to implement your own AutoML algorithms and compare with other algorithms
* As a ML platform owner, you want to support AutoML in your platform

# Getting Started with NNI

## **Installation**
Install through python pip
* requirements: python >= 3.5
```
pip3 install -v --user git+https://github.com/Microsoft/nni.git
source ~/.bashrc
```


## **Quick start: run an experiment at local**
Requirements:
* NNI installed on your local machine

Run the following command to create an experiment for [mnist]
```bash
    nnictl create --config ~/nni/examples/trials/mnist-annotation/config.yml
```
This command will start an experiment and a WebUI. The WebUI endpoint will be shown in the output of this command (for example, `http://localhost:8080`). Open this URL in your browser. You can analyze your experiment through WebUI, or browse trials' tensorboard. 

Please refer to [here](docs/GetStarted.md) for the GetStarted tutorial.

# Contributing
This project welcomes contributions and suggestions, we are constructing the contribution guidelines, stay tuned =).

We use [GitHub issues](https://github.com/Microsoft/nni/issues) for tracking requests and bugs.