Dear Colleagues,
We are glad to announce the second edition of the "*Graph Neural
Networking challenge*", organized as part of the "ITU AI/ML in 5G
Challenge".
Challenge description: *Creating a Scalable Network Digital Twin*
We provide several resources and tips to easily start working on the
challenge (See “Main Resources”).
Top-3 teams will have access to the global round of the "ITU AI/ML in 5G
Challenge <https://aiforgood.itu.int/ai-ml-in-5g-challenge/>". This
competition attracted over 1,300 participants around the world in the
last edition, and there were attractive cash prizes for winners.
Registration is now open and free of charge for all participants
(Deadline Aug 31st).
Website: https://bnn.upc.edu/challenge/gnnet2021
<https://bnn.upc.edu/challenge/gnnet2021>
Registration: https://bnn.upc.edu/challenge/gnnet2021/registration
<https://bnn.upc.edu/challenge/gnnet2021/registration>
If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact
us at: gnnetchallenge(a)bnn.upc.edu <mailto:gnnetchallenge@bnn.upc.edu>
=====================================================
[Overview]
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have produced groundbreaking applications in
many fields where data is fundamentally structured as graphs (e.g.,
chemistry, physics, biology, recommender systems). In the field of
computer networks, this new type of neural networks is being rapidly
adopted for a wide variety of use cases, particularly for those
involving complex graphs (e.g., performance modeling, routing
optimization, resource allocation in wireless networks).
The Graph Neural Networking challenge 2021 brings a fundamental
limitation of existing GNNs: their lack of generalization capability to
larger graphs. In order to achieve production-ready GNN-based solutions,
we need models that can be trained in network testbeds of limited size
(e.g., at the vendor’s networking lab), and then be directly ready to
operate with guarantees in real customer networks, which are often much
larger in number of nodes. In this challenge, participants are asked to
design GNN-based models that can be trained on small network scenarios
(up to 50 nodes), and after that scale successfully to larger networks
not seen before, up to 300 nodes. Solutions with better scalability
properties will be the winners.
[Problem statement]
The goal of this challenge is to create a scalable Network Digital Twin
based on neural networks, which can accurately estimate QoS performance
metrics given a network state snapshot. More in detail, solutions must
predict the per-path mean delay given: (i) a network topology, (ii) a
traffic matrix, and (iii) a routing configuration.
As a baseline, we provide RouteNet, a GNN model recently proposed to
estimate end-to-end performance metrics (e.g., delay, jitter, loss) in
networks. However, RouteNet does not scale well to networks considerably
larger than those observed during the training phase. As a result, it
does not perform well when applied to this challenge.
Participants are encouraged to update RouteNet or submit their own
neural network models.
[Main resources]
- Summary slides (with some tips for participants)
- Baseline GNN model: Open source implementation of RouteNet, including
a tutorial on how to use it and modify fundamental characteristics of
the model
- Training/validation datasets
- Python API to easily read and process the datasets
- Mailing list for participants and people interested (Link to
subscribe:https://mail.bnn.upc.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/challenge2021
<https://mail.bnn.upc.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/challenge2021>).
[Timeline]
* Registration open to participants: Deadline Aug 31st
* Evaluation phase: Sep 16th
* Winners (top 3) official announcement: Oct 31st
* Final awards and presentation: Dec 2021
*_Important notice_**:* You have received this email because you are
subscribed to the challenge-kdn(a)mail.knowledgedefinednetworking.org
<mailto:challenge-kdn@mail.knowledgedefinednetworking.org>mailing list.
From June 15^th this list will be removed, and all members will be
moved to a new mailing list related to the Graph Neural Networking
challenge: challenges(a)mail.bnn.upc.edu <mailto:challenges@mail.bnn.upc.edu>
Please, let us know if you do not want to be included in this new list
before June 15^th by sending an email to gnnetchallenge(a)bnn.upc.edu
<mailto:gnnetchallenge@bnn.upc.edu>. Otherwise, we will add all members
by default.
Regards,
José Suárez-Varela
------------------------
Barcelona Neural Networking center (BNN-UPC)
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Dear participants,
Please take some time to fill this short survey from ITU. Your feedback
will be very useful to plan future editions of the challenge.
Thank you in advance.
Best regards,
José Suárez-Varela
Barcelona Neural Networking center
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
-------- Mensaje reenviado --------
Asunto: ITU AI/ML in 5G Challenge experience survey
Fecha: Fri, 13 Nov 2020 08:51:08 +0000
De: AI-5G-Challenge, ITU <ai5gchallenge(a)itu.int>
Para: AI-5G-Challenge, ITU <ai5gchallenge(a)itu.int>
Dear Participants,
As the first edition of the ITU AI/ML in 5G Challenge is drawing to a
close, we would like to understand your experience in this edition. This
helps us to plan towards future editions of the Challenge. Please take
some time to respond to our questions in the survey below (e.g. on your
motivations, clarity of problem statements, availability of resources,
etc) so that we can improve your experience in the upcoming edition of
the Challenge. We would like to get responses from everyone (whether you
submitted a solution or not).
Please follow the link here to answer the survey
<https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=12TkI-YEh0uRPCS9iSGf0-y…>.
*/Team leaders/*: make sure that you share this survey with your team
members.
Looking forward to receiving your responses.
Regards
Thomas
ITU AI/ML in 5G Challenge
Dear participants of the Graph Neural Networking challenge 2020,
First of all, thank you very much again on behalf of the BNN organizing
team for participating in this challenge. We hope you enjoyed it a lot.
Also, we expect it was a good opportunity for some of you to get
introduced to the topics of network modeling and Graph Neural Networks.
Once the evaluation phase has finished, we are glad to announce a
provisional ranking with all the teams that submitted solutions for the
challenge. You can find it at this link:
https://bnn.upc.edu/challenge2020
We are very happy to see that you have made a really active
participation. For the top-5 teams, please expect a separate email with
detailed instructions on how to prepare the required documentation and
the code to reproduce your solutions.
For your interest, from the BNN team we have also prepared a possible
solution for this challenge. Particularly, we have implemented a GNN
model that introduces the queue entity as part of the internal GNN
architecture. This enables to effectively model the impact of various
queuing policies on delay. For more information, we have posted a short
paper describing the solution and including some evaluation results on
other datasets than those used in the challenge
(https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.06686).
Best regards,
José Suárez-Varela
Barcelona Neural Networking center
Universitat Politècnica de catalunya
Dear participants,
I would like to remind you that the end of the evaluation phase is
approaching. You can make submissions until *October 15th at 23:59:59
(GMT+2)*.
Once the evaluation finishes, we will post in our website a ranking (on
Oct 16th) with all the teams that submitted solutions and their scores.
Also, we will send instructions to the top-3 teams with details on how
to prepare the documentation and the code to reproduce the training of
their solutions.
Best regards,
José Suárez-Varela
Barcelona Neural Networking center
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Dear participants,
We found a small error in the document with the instructions for the
evaluation phase. Particularly, to generate the output CSV format with
your solutions you can use the following pseudo-code:
String = “”
For node_src in range (19):
For node_dst in range (19):
*If node_src != node_dst:*
String += str(delay[node_src, node_dst])+”;”
# New sample, new line
String +=”\n”
This skips the node pairs where the source and destination match, thus
resulting in 342 src-dst delay values (i.e., 19 sources x 18
destinations = 342 values).
Please find attached a new version of the instruction document fixing
this error.
Also, to help you validate the format of your submission files, I attach
a ZIP file with the expected format when applying a solution to our toy
validation dataset
(https://github.com/knowledgedefinednetworking/RouteNet-challenge/tree/maste…).
Note that in this case the results correspond to a 17-node network, so
we have 17x16=272 src-dst delay values per line. However, with the final
test dataset we should expect 342 values per line.
*I would like to take this opportunity to encourage you to register on
our evaluation platform in advance to avoid potential problems before
the evaluation phase starts **(October 1st)**.*
Best regards,
José Suárez-Varela
Barcelona Neural Networking center
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Dear participants,
We are glad to announce that the final test dataset will be publicly
available at the following link from today (Sep 30^th ) at 12:00 (CEST):
https://challenge.bnn.upc.edu/downloads?download=5:gnnet-data-set-evaluation
Please note that the evaluation phase will open on Oct 1^st at 00:00:00
(CEST), so it will NOT be possible to make submissions before this time.
However, you can start generating the submission files with your
solutions. Remember that you can only make a maximum of 5 submissions
each day, and in total each team can make up to 20 submissions. The
evaluation platform will accept submissions until October 15^th at
23:59:59 (CEST).
In the evaluation platform you will be able to find an anonymized
ranking with the 5 best scores at the moment. This may help assess how
good are your results compared to other teams. Each team will be
considered for its best score, regardless of whether it is the last
submission or not. Also, you will have access to a log with all the
submissions of your team registered in our platform and the scores
obtained.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any problems or need
help during the evaluation process.
Enjoy the challenge!
Challenge website: https://bnn.upc.edu/challenge2020
Best regards,
José Suárez-Varela
Barcelona Neural Networking center
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Dear participants,
As maybe some of you may not have received this information, we would
like to share with you that ITU announced officially the following
awards for the winners of the global round:
- *1st prize**: 5,000 CHF *(approx. $5,510 /4,640 €)
- *2nd prize**: 3,000 CHF* (approx. $3,306 / 2,784€)
- *3rd prize**: 2,000 CHF* (approx. $2,204 / 1,856€)
- *3 Runners up*: *1,000 CHF* (approx. $1,102 / 928€) each.
Note that top-3 solutions of the Graph Neural Networking challenge will
have access to the global round.
Also, the winners of this challenge will receive some amounts directly,
which will be announced shortly.
*Please, remember that the evaluation phase starts on **October 1st**,
and **try to register on our evaluation platform with some time in
advance to avoid potential issues. *Also, we recommend to validate the
output format of your submissions with the instructions we provide in
the attached document.
*We encourage all of you to participate in the evaluation*. Even if you
think your solution may not be among the top ones, you have nothing to
lose and eventually you may be gladly rewarded. Also, keep in mind that
there are three winning positions.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any comments or questions.
Enjoy the challenge!
Challenge website: https://bnn.upc.edu/challenge2020
Best regards,
José Suárez-Varela
Barcelona Neural Networking center
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Dear participants,
Thank you again for taking part in this challenge.
The evaluation process will open soon (Oct 1^st -Oct15^th ), and from
the organizing team of the Barcelona Neural Networking center we would
like to share with you some detailed instructions on how it will be
done. Please, read carefully the attached document and *try to register
on our platform before the start of the evaluation phase (Oct 1st).
Also, we recommend to validate in advance the output format of your
submissions with the example dataset and the script we provide*.
Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any comments or questions
about all this process.
Enjoy the challenge!
Challenge website: https://bnn.upc.edu/challenge2020
Regards,
José Suárez-Varela
Barcelona Neural Networking center
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Dear participants,
We have found a small bug in the API we provide to read the datasets
(datanetAPI.py). This particularly affects the functions
"get_maxAvgLambda()" and "get_global_delay()" of the API.
If you are using RouteNet
(https://github.com/knowledgedefinednetworking/RouteNet-challenge),
please update the code with the latest version of the repository. You
can do it with "git pull" from the terminal or downloading the code
directly from the GitHub website. Alternatively, if you have already
made major modifications to the code, you can replace only the file
"datanetAPI.py" under the directory "RouteNet-challenge/code/".
The same applies if you are using the API code provided at
https://github.com/knowledgedefinednetworking/datanetAPI.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Enjoy the challenge! And remember, if you have any questions/comments
don't hesitate to use this mailing list to share them.
Best Regards,
Albert López
Barcelona Neural Networking center
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Dear Minh,
Please, find my answers inline:
> Dear GNNet challenge 2020 organizing team,
>
> My name is Minh, one of the participants in the challenge. I have
> questions about the RouteNet code on GitHub that I want to ask as follows:
>
> 1) Can you please provide a requirements.txt file of your Python
> environment? I'm aware that you wrote the codes depend on
> tensorflow=2.1.0, networks>=2.4, and pandas >=0.24, but I often get
> different errors when running on different machines, so I think a
> requirements.txt file will make it easier not only for me but also for
> all other participants.
We are aware that the process to install all the libraries may be a bit
confusing. However, we decided not to put a 'requirements.txt' file
because we think it can be more error-prone. The main problem comes when
you install TensorFlow in a machine with a CUDA-enabled GPU card, since
you need to have the right CUDA and CuDNN versions pre-installed. These
libraries depend on the operating system and the version you use.
Thus, the most laborious part is to install correctly CUDA and CuDNN,
but you can do it in a pretty systematic way following this TensorFlow
tutorial:
https://www.tensorflow.org/install/gpu
> 2) What is the terminating point of RouteNet as a baseline for the
> challenge? From what I see, it only stops after 5 million steps, which
> takes an incredibly long time, should this be the terminating point of
> the algorithm? And the results after 5 million steps are the baseline
> results for the competition?
This is just an arbitrary upper bound limit we set in the
implementation. The idea is that you can stop the execution whenever you
want based on the training progress, and the last models (checkpoints)
are automatically saved in the "../logs/model_log" directory. Note that
after 400k steps the model has iterated over all the training dataset.
Further iterations can only help slightly refine the model.
You can take the baseline as a reference implementation to develop your
model. However, with this baseline you can expect a MAPE (Mean Absolute
Percentage Error) above 100%. One main reason is that it does not encode
information about queue scheduling, and this has a great impact on
network delay.
*
*
> I look forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Minh Nguyen.
>
> King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
> Al-Khawarizmi Applied Math. Building (Bldg. #1) | Level 3, Table
> 3139-WS01
> Thuwal 23955-6900 | Makkah Province
> Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
I hope I answered all your questions. Please, let me know if you have
any more questions/comments.
Regards,
José Suárez-varela
Barcelona Neural Networking center - UPC