Optimising AI Training Deployments using Graph Compilers and Containers
This work addresses deployment inefficiencies for AI practitioners in HPC and cloud environments, though it is incremental as it builds on existing container and compiler technologies.
The paper tackles the complexity of deploying and optimizing AI training workloads in diverse HPC and cloud infrastructures by introducing MODAK, a tool that maps optimal parameters and builds optimized containers. Evaluation on MNIST-CNN and ResNet50 shows that custom optimized containers outperform official DockerHub images, with performance gains dependent on hardware and network complexity.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN) or Deep Learning (DL) have become popular due to their success in solving problems likeimage analysis and speech recognition. Training a DNN is computationally intensive and High Performance Computing(HPC) has been a key driver in AI growth. Virtualisation and container technology have led to the convergence of cloud and HPC infrastructure. These infrastructures with diverse hardware increase the complexity of deploying and optimising AI training workloads. AI training deployments in HPC or cloud can be optimised with target-specific libraries, graph compilers, andby improving data movement or IO. Graph compilers aim to optimise the execution of a DNN graph by generating an optimised code for a target hardware/backend. As part of SODALITE (a Horizon 2020 project), MODAK tool is developed to optimise application deployment in software defined infrastructures. Using input from the data scientist and performance modelling, MODAK maps optimal application parameters to a target infrastructure and builds an optimised container. In this paper, we introduce MODAK and review container technologies and graph compilers for AI. We illustrate optimisation of AI training deployments using graph compilers and Singularity containers. Evaluation using MNIST-CNN and ResNet50 training workloads shows that custom built optimised containers outperform the official images from DockerHub. We also found that the performance of graph compilers depends on the target hardware and the complexity of the neural network.