MLPerf Training Benchmark

Part of Proceedings of Machine Learning and Systems 2 (MLSys 2020)

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Authors

Peter Mattson, Christine Cheng, Gregory Diamos, Cody Coleman, Paulius Micikevicius, David Patterson, Hanlin Tang, Gu-Yeon Wei, Peter Bailis, Victor Bittorf, David Brooks, Dehao Chen, Debo Dutta, Udit Gupta, Kim Hazelwood, Andy Hock, Xinyuan Huang, Daniel Kang, David Kanter, Naveen Kumar, Jeffery Liao, Deepak Narayanan, Tayo Oguntebi, Gennady Pekhimenko, Lillian Pentecost, Vijay Janapa Reddi, Taylor Robie, Tom St John, Carole-Jean Wu, Lingjie Xu, Cliff Young, Matei Zaharia

Abstract

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.