N2Sky-A Neural Network Problem Solving Environment Fostering Virtual Resources

This paper presents the novel N2Sky system which provides a virtual collaboration platform to the computational intelligence community. It realizes the Neural Networks as a Service paradigm allowing to share and exchange neural network knowledge resources on a worldwide basis by a transparent environment fostering state-of-art hardware and software infrastructures. The system is motivated by the goal to deliver an intuitive tool for different stakeholders of the neural network community, as arbitrary users, looking for a packaged neural network solution to a given problem, neural network engineers, creating and training their own neural network object based on available paradigms, and experienced neural network contributors, developing and implementing their own neural network type and sharing it with the community. To meet these targets N2Sky provides an intuitive user interface which embodies latest web technology to make the user's interaction as simple and efficient as possible. Fostering cloud resources N2Sky is based on container-based virtualization technology to provide higher flexibility, portability, dynamic orchestration, and performance. We give the motivation and design goals for the new system, describe its architectural layout and technical specifics, and present use cases for the different user types.