9.2NIApr 16
Switching Efficiency: A Novel Framework for Dissecting AI Data Center Network EfficiencyNiangen Ye, Jiawen Zhu, Baojun Chen et al.
Communication is pivotal in LLM training, and a thorough analysis of the communication efficiency of AI data center (AIDC) network is essential for guiding the design of these capital-intensive clusters. However, conventional metrics are inadequate for such analysis, as they do not directly link network activity to computational progress and lack granularity to diagnose the impact of different network design patterns. To address this, we introduce a metric framework, the Switching Efficiency Framework, whose core metric - Switching Efficiency ($η$) - quantifies computationally effective data throughput per unit switching capacity. We further decompose $η$ into three factors - Data, Routing Efficiency, and Port Utilization to facilitate analysis of distinct communication bottlenecks. Using this metric framework, we demonstrate how the symmetric, distributed switching of 3D-Torus and the centralized, hierarchical switching of Rail-Optimized architecture align with sparse or imbalanced LLM training traffic, and show that All-to-All traffic from Mixture-of-Experts models severely degrades their port utilization and routing efficiency. Our analysis also demonstrates how key design choices - such as adjusting switching resource allocation, expanding server size, adopting in-network computing, and multi-plane design - positively influence distinct facets of communication efficiency. Ultimately, the Switching Efficiency Framework provides an analytical tool for analyzing efficiency bottlenecks, thereby informing the design of future-generation AIDC networks.
9.6CVMar 26, 2024
Exploring Dynamic Transformer for Efficient Object TrackingJiawen Zhu, Xin Chen, Haiwen Diao et al.
The speed-precision trade-off is a critical problem for visual object tracking which usually requires low latency and deployment on constrained resources. Existing solutions for efficient tracking mainly focus on adopting light-weight backbones or modules, which nevertheless come at the cost of a sacrifice in precision. In this paper, inspired by dynamic network routing, we propose DyTrack, a dynamic transformer framework for efficient tracking. Real-world tracking scenarios exhibit diverse levels of complexity. We argue that a simple network is sufficient for easy frames in video sequences, while more computation could be assigned to difficult ones. DyTrack automatically learns to configure proper reasoning routes for various inputs, gaining better utilization of the available computational budget. Thus, it can achieve higher performance with the same running speed. We formulate instance-specific tracking as a sequential decision problem and attach terminating branches to intermediate layers of the entire model. Especially, to fully utilize the computations, we introduce the feature recycling mechanism to reuse the outputs of predecessors. Furthermore, a target-aware self-distillation strategy is designed to enhance the discriminating capabilities of early predictions by effectively mimicking the representation pattern of the deep model. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DyTrack achieves promising speed-precision trade-offs with only a single model. For instance, DyTrack obtains 64.9% AUC on LaSOT with a speed of 256 fps.