DALI

The NVIDIA Data Loading Library (DALI) is a library for data loading and pre-processing to accelerate deep learning applications. It provides a collection of highly optimized building blocks for loading and processing image, video and audio data. It can be used as a portable drop-in replacement for built-in data loaders and data iterators in popular deep learning frameworks. Deep learning applications require complex, multi-stage data processing pipelines that include loading, decoding, cropping, resizing, and many other augmentations. These data processing pipelines, which are currently executed on the CPU, have become a bottleneck, limiting the performance and scalability of training and inference. DALI addresses the problem of the CPU bottleneck by offloading data preprocessing to the GPU. Additionally, DALI relies on its own execution engine, built to maximize the throughput of the input pipeline.