Streaming Benchmarks on the Graphcore Intelligence Processing Unit.
Abstract not provided.
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Abstract not provided.
Atomic structure prediction and associated property calculations are the bedrock of chemical physics. Since high-fidelity ab initio modeling techniques for computing the structure and properties can be prohibitively expensive, this motivates the development of machine-learning (ML) models that make these predictions more efficiently. Training graph neural networks over large atomistic databases introduces unique computational challenges such as the need to process millions of small graphs with variable size and support communication patterns that are distinct from learning over large graphs such as social networks. We demonstrate a novel hardware-software co-design approach to scale up the training of atomistic graph neural networks (GNN) for structure and property prediction. First, to eliminate redundant computation and memory associated with alternative padding techniques and to improve throughput via minimizing communication, we formulate the effective coalescing of the batches of variable-size atomistic graphs as the bin packing problem and introduce a hardware-agnostic algorithm to pack these batches. In addition, we propose hardware-specific optimizations including a planner and vectorization for the gather-scatter operations targeted for Graphcore’s Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), as well as model-specific optimizations such as merged communication collectives and optimized softplus. Putting these all together, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed co-design approach by providing an implementation of a well-established atomistic GNN on the Graphcore IPUs. We evaluate the training performance on multiple atomistic graph databases with varying degrees of graph counts, sizes and sparsity. Here, we demonstrate that such a co-design approach can reduce the training time of atomistic GNNs and can improve the performance by up to 1.5× compared to the baseline implementation of the model on the IPUs. Additionally, we compare our IPU implementation with a Nvidia GPU-based implementation and show that our atomistic GNN implementation on the IPUs can run 1.8× faster on average compared to the execution time on the GPUs.
Defending cybersystems needs accurate mapping of software and hardware vulnerabilities to generalized descriptions of weaknesses, and weaknesses to exploits. These mappings enable cyber defenders to build plans for effective defense and assessment of potential risks to a cybersystem. With close to 170k vulnerabilities, manual mapping is not a feasible option. However, automated mapping is challenging due to limited training data, computational intractability, and limitations in computational natural language processing. Tools based on breakthroughs in Transformer-based language models have been demonstrated to classify vulnerabilities with high accuracy. We make three key contributions in this paper: (1) We present a new framework, \VWCBERT, that augments the Transformer-based hierarchical multi-class classification framework of Das et al. (\textsc{V2W-BERT}) with the ability to map weaknesses to exploits. (2) We implement \VWCBERT~ on modern AI accelerator platforms using two data parallel techniques for the pre-training phase and demonstrate nearly linear speedups across NVIDIA and Graphcore accelerator platforms. We observe nearly linear speedups for up to 16 V100 and 8 A100 GPUs, and about 3.4$\times$ speedup for A100 relative to V100 GPUs. We also observe excellent speedups on Graphcore, with $5.7\times$ speedup on 128 IPUs relative to 16 IPUs. Enabled by scaling, we also demonstrate higher accuracy using a larger language model, RoBERTa-Large. We show up to 87\% accuracy for strict and up to 98\% accuracy for relaxed classification. (3) We develop a novel parallel link manager for the link prediction phase and demonstrate up to 21$\times$ speedup with 16 V100 GPUs relative to one V100 GPU, and thus reducing the runtime from 2.5 hours to 10 minutes. We believe that generalizability and scalability of \VWCBERT~ will benefit both the theoretical development and practical deployment of novel cyberdefense solutions and vulnerability classification.
As the size and complexity of AI/ML workloads continue to increase, the demand for specialized hardware accelerators has grown rapidly. To better understand the landscape of commercial AI/ML accelerators, we evaluate and compare several popular platforms, including Graphcore IPU, Sambanova RDU, and GPUs, on a range of AI workloads. Our research aims to help researchers and developers understand the unique features of commercial AI/ML accelerators and provide reference design and performance numbers for research prototypes. By shedding light on the current landscape of commercial AI/ML accelerators, we hope to offer insights into the future development of specialized hardware accelerators for AI/ML.
We present a case for low batch-size inference with the potential for adaptive training of a lean encoder model. We do so in the context of a paradigmatic example of machine learning as applied in data acquisition at high data velocity scientific user facilities such as the Linac Coherent Light Source-II x-ray Free-Electron Laser. We discuss how a low-latency inference model operating at the data acquisition edge can capitalize on the naturally stochastic nature of such sources. We simulate the method of attosecond angular streaking to produce representative results whereby simulated input data reproduce high-resolution ground truth probability distributions. By minimizing the mean-squared error between the decoded output of the latent representation and the ground truth distributions, we ensure that the encoding layers and resulting latent representation maintains full fidelity for any downstream task, be it classification or regression. We present throughput results for data-parallel inference of various batch sizes, some with throughput exceeding 100 k images per second. We also show in situ training below 10 s per epoch for the full encoder–decoder model as would be relevant for streaming and adaptive real-time data production at our nation’s scientific light sources.