No Arabic abstract
Todays Internet Services are undergoing fundamental changes and shifting to an intelligent computing era where AI is widely employed to augment services. In this context, many innovative AI algorithms, systems, and architectures are proposed, and thus the importance of benchmarking and evaluating them rises. However, modern Internet services adopt a microservice-based architecture and consist of various modules. The diversity of these modules and complexity of execution paths, the massive scale and complex hierarchy of datacenter infrastructure, the confidential issues of data sets and workloads pose great challenges to benchmarking. In this paper, we present the first industry-standard Internet service AI benchmark suite---AIBench with seventeen industry partners, including several top Internet service providers. AIBench provides a highly extensible, configurable, and flexible benchmark framework that contains loosely coupled modules. We identify sixteen prominent AI problem domains like learning to rank, each of which forms an AI component benchmark, from three most important Internet service domains: search engine, social network, and e-commerce, which is by far the most comprehensive AI benchmarking effort. On the basis of the AIBench framework, abstracting the real-world data sets and workloads from one of the top e-commerce providers, we design and implement the first end-to-end Internet service AI benchmark, which contains the primary modules in the critical paths of an industry scale application and is scalable to deploy on different cluster scales. The specifications, source code, and performance numbers are publicly available from the benchmark council web site http://www.benchcouncil.org/AIBench/index.html.
Domain-specific software and hardware co-design is encouraging as it is much easier to achieve efficiency for fewer tasks. Agile domain-specific benchmarking speeds up the process as it provides not only relevant design inputs but also relevant metrics, and tools. Unfortunately, modern workloads like Big data, AI, and Internet services dwarf the traditional one in terms of code size, deployment scale, and execution path, and hence raise serious benchmarking challenges. This paper proposes an agile domain-specific benchmarking methodology. Together with seventeen industry partners, we identify ten important end-to-end application scenarios, among which sixteen representative AI tasks are distilled as the AI component benchmarks. We propose the permutations of essential AI and non-AI component benchmarks as end-to-end benchmarks. An end-to-end benchmark is a distillation of the essential attributes of an industry-scale application. We design and implement a highly extensible, configurable, and flexible benchmark framework, on the basis of which, we propose the guideline for building end-to-end benchmarks, and present the first end-to-end Internet service AI benchmark. The preliminary evaluation shows the value of our benchmark suite---AIBench against MLPerf and TailBench for hardware and software designers, micro-architectural researchers, and code developers. The specifications, source code, testbed, and results are publicly available from the web site url{http://www.benchcouncil.org/AIBench/index.html}.
Earlier-stage evaluations of a new AI architecture/system need affordable benchmarks. Only using a few AI component benchmarks like MLPerfalone in the other stages may lead to misleading conclusions. Moreover, the learning dynamics are not well understood, and the benchmarks shelf-life is short. This paper proposes a balanced benchmarking methodology. We use real-world benchmarks to cover the factors space that impacts the learning dynamics to the most considerable extent. After performing an exhaustive survey on Internet service AI domains, we identify and implement nineteen representative AI tasks with state-of-the-art models. For repeatable performance ranking (RPR subset) and workload characterization (WC subset), we keep two subsets to a minimum for affordability. We contribute by far the most comprehensive AI training benchmark suite. The evaluations show: (1) AIBench Training (v1.1) outperforms MLPerfTraining (v0.7) in terms of diversity and representativeness of model complexity, computational cost, convergent rate, computation, and memory access patterns, and hotspot functions; (2) Against the AIBench full benchmarks, its RPR subset shortens the benchmarking cost by 64%, while maintaining the primary workload characteristics; (3) The performance ranking shows the single-purpose AI accelerator like TPU with the optimized TensorFlowframework performs better than that of GPUs while losing the latters general support for various AI models. The specification, source code, and performance numbers are available from the AIBench homepage https://www.benchcouncil.org/aibench-training/index.html.
Several fundamental changes in technology indicate domain-specific hardware and software co-design is the only path left. In this context, architecture, system, data management, and machine learning communities pay greater attention to innovative big data and AI algorithms, architecture, and systems. Unfortunately, complexity, diversity, frequently-changed workloads, and rapid evolution of big data and AI systems raise great challenges. First, the traditional benchmarking methodology that creates a new benchmark or proxy for every possible workload is not scalable, or even impossible for Big Data and AI benchmarking. Second, it is prohibitively expensive to tailor the architecture to characteristics of one or more application or even a domain of applications. We consider each big data and AI workload as a pipeline of one or more classes of units of computation performed on different initial or intermediate data inputs, each class of which we call a data motif. On the basis of our previous work that identifies eight data motifs taking up most of the run time of a wide variety of big data and AI workloads, we propose a scalable benchmarking methodology that uses the combination of one or more data motifs---to represent diversity of big data and AI workloads. Following this methodology, we present a unified big data and AI benchmark suite---BigDataBench 4.0, publicly available from~url{http://prof.ict.ac.cn/BigDataBench}. This unified benchmark suite sheds new light on domain-specific hardware and software co-design: tailoring the system and architecture to characteristics of the unified eight data motifs other than one or more application case by case. Also, for the first time, we comprehensively characterize the CPU pipeline efficiency using the benchmarks of seven workload types in BigDataBench 4.0.
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is one of the most promising directions for the future of cloud services, and serverless functions have immediately become a new middleware for building scalable and cost-efficient microservices and applications. However, the quickly moving technology hinders reproducibility, and the lack of a standardized benchmarking suite leads to ad-hoc solutions and microbenchmarks being used in serverless research, further complicating metaanalysis and comparison of research solutions. To address this challenge, we propose the Serverless Benchmark Suite: the first benchmark for FaaS computing that systematically covers a wide spectrum of cloud resources and applications. Our benchmark consists of the specification of representative workloads, the accompanying implementation and evaluation infrastructure, and the evaluation methodology that facilitates reproducibility and enables interpretability. We demonstrate that the abstract model of a FaaS execution environment ensures the applicability of our benchmark to multiple commercial providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Our work facilities experimental evaluation of serverless systems, and delivers a standardized, reliable and evolving evaluation methodology of performance, efficiency, scalability and reliability of middleware FaaS platforms.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has significant potential to positively impact and advance medical imaging, including positron emission tomography (PET) imaging applications. AI has the ability to enhance and optimize all aspects of the PET imaging chain from patient scheduling, patient setup, protocoling, data acquisition, detector signal processing, reconstruction, image processing and interpretation. AI poses industry-specific challenges which will need to be addressed and overcome to maximize the future potentials of AI in PET. This paper provides an overview of these industry-specific challenges for the development, standardization, commercialization, and clinical adoption of AI, and explores the potential enhancements to PET imaging brought on by AI in the near future. In particular, the combination of on-demand image reconstruction, AI, and custom designed data processing workflows may open new possibilities for innovation which would positively impact the industry and ultimately patients.