Chainer

Chainer
Original authorSeiya Tokui
DevelopersCommunity, Preferred Networks, Inc.
Initial releaseJune 9, 2015 (2015-06-09).
Stable release
7.8.1 / 5 January 2022 (5 January 2022)
Written inPython
Platformcross-platform
Available inPython
TypeDeep learning library
LicenseMIT
Websitechainer.org
Repository

Chainer is an open source deep learning framework written purely in Python on top of NumPy and CuPy Python libraries. The development is led by Japanese venture company Preferred Networks in partnership with IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Nvidia.

Chainer is notable for its early adoption of "define-by-run" scheme, as well as its performance on large scale systems. The first version was released in June 2015 and has gained large popularity in Japan since then. Furthermore, in 2017, it was listed by KDnuggets in top 10 open source machine learning Python projects.

In December 2019, Preferred Networks announced the transition of its development effort from Chainer to PyTorch and it will only provide maintenance patches after releasing v7.