Researchers at INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics) face challenges from basic to hard science use cases (e.g., big-data latest generation experiments) in many areas: High Energy Physics (HEP), Astrophysics, Quantum Computing, Genomics, etc. Machine Learning (ML) adoption is ubiquitous in these areas, requiring researchers to solve problems related to the specificity of applications (e.g., tailored models and intricate domain knowledge), but also requiring solving general infrastructure-level and ML-workflow related problems. As the demand for ML solutions continues to rise across the diverse research domains, there exists a critical need for an innovative approach to accelerate ML adoption.

In this regard we introduce an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform designed as an application-agnostic Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) solution. The platform provides a paradigm shift by offering a flexible and generalized infrastructure that decouples the ML development process from the specific use cases. The AI platform is implemented as a software layer on top of our cloud platform: the INFN Cloud, a dedicated, geographically distributed infrastructure which offers composable, scalable, and open-source solutions. The AI platform leverages INFN Cloud resources and principles, gathering and orchestrating technologies to support end-to-end scalable ML solutions: Kubernetes, Kubeflow, KServe, KNative, Kueue, Horovod, etc., ensuring support for several ML frameworks: TensorFlow, PyTorch, Apache MXNet, XGBoost, etc.

This paper describes the platform’s design and principles, as well as some selected use cases from
Natural Language Processing and HEP domains that can take advantage of the “aaS” approach.