MLPerf HPC: A Holistic Benchmark Suite for Scientific Machine Learning on HPC Systems

Scientific communities are increasingly adopting machine learning and deep learning models in their applications to accelerate scientific insights. High performance computing systems are pushing the frontiers of performance with a rich diversity of hardware resources and massive scale-out capabilities. There is a critical need to understand fair and effective benchmarking of machine learning applications that are representative of real-world scientific use cases. MLPerf is a community-driven standard to benchmark machine learning workloads, focusing on end-to-end performance metrics. In this paper, we introduce MLPerf HPC, a benchmark suite of large-scale scientific machine learning training applications driven by the MLCommons Association. We present the results from the first submission round, including a diverse set of some of the world's largest HPC systems. We develop a systematic framework for their joint analysis and compare them in terms of data staging, algorithmic convergence, and compute performance. As a result, we gain a quantitative understanding of optimizations on different subsystems such as staging and on-node loading of data, compute-unit utilization, and communication scheduling, enabling overall $>10 \times$ (end-to-end) performance improvements through system scaling. Notably, our analysis shows a scale-dependent interplay between the dataset size, a system's memory hierarchy, and training convergence that underlines the importance of near-compute storage. To overcome the data-parallel scalability challenge at large batch sizes, we discuss specific learning techniques and hybrid data-and-model parallelism that are effective on large systems. We conclude by characterizing each benchmark with respect to low-level memory, I/O, and network behavior to parameterize extended roofline performance models in future rounds.

MLPerf Inference Benchmark

Machine-learning (ML) hardware and software system demand is burgeoning. Driven by ML applications, the number of different ML inference systems has exploded. Over 100 organizations are building ML inference chips, and the systems that incorporate existing models span at least three orders of magnitude in power consumption and four orders of magnitude in performance; they range from embedded devices to data-center solutions. Fueling the hardware are a dozen or more software frameworks and libraries. The myriad combinations of ML hardware and ML software make assessing ML-system performance in an architecture-neutral, representative, and reproducible manner challenging. There is a clear need for industry-wide standard ML benchmarking and evaluation criteria. MLPerf Inference answers that call. Driven by more than 30 organizations as well as more than 200 ML engineers and practitioners, MLPerf implements a set of rules and practices to ensure comparability across systems with wildly differing architectures. In this paper, we present the method and design principles of the initial MLPerf Inference release. The first call for submissions garnered more than 600 inference-performance measurements from 14 organizations, representing over 30 systems that show a range of capabilities.

MLPerf Training Benchmark

Machine learning is experiencing an explosion of software and hardware solutions, and needs industry-standard performance benchmarks to drive design and enable competitive evaluation. However, machine learning training presents a number of unique challenges to benchmarking that do not exist in other domains: (1) some optimizations that improve training throughput actually increase time to solution, (2) training is stochastic and time to solution has high variance, and (3) the software and hardware systems are so diverse that they cannot be fairly benchmarked with the same binary, code, or even hyperparameters. We present MLPerf, a machine learning benchmark that overcomes these challenges. We quantitatively evaluate the efficacy of MLPerf in driving community progress on performance and scalability across two rounds of results from multiple vendors.