BigDL deep learning library is a Spark-based framework for creating and deploying deep learning models at scale. While it has previously been deployed on Azure HDInsight and Data Science VM, making it available on Azure Marketplace as a fixed VM image represents a further step in reducing the deployment complexity.
Since BigDL is an integral part of Spark, a user does not need to explicitly manage distributed computations. While providing a high-level control “knobs” such as number of compute nodes, cores, and batch size, a BigDL application leverages stable Spark infrastructure for node communications and resource management during its execution. BigDL applications can be written in either Python or Scala and achieve high performance through both algorithm optimization and taking advantage of intimate integration with Intel’s Math Kernel Library (MKL).
Read about it in the Azure blog.