Currently, there is no consistent benchmarking across multi-disciplines. Even no previous work tries to relate different categories of benchmarks in multi-disciplines. This article investigates the origin and evolution of the benchmark term. Five categories of benchmarks are summarized, including measurement standards, standardized data sets with defined properties, representative workloads, representative data sets, and best practices, which widely exist in multi-disciplines. I believe there are two pressing challenges in growing this discipline: establishing consistent benchmarking across multi-disciplines and developing meta-benchmark to measure the benchmarks themselves. I propose establishing benchmark science and engineering; one of the primary goals is to set up a standard benchmark hierarchy across multi-disciplines. It is the right time to launch a multi-disciplinary benchmark, standard, and evaluation journal, TBench, to communicate the state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice of benchmark science and engineering.

Current trends in HPC, such as the push to exascale, convergence with Big Data, and growing complexity of HPC applications, have created gaps that traditional performance tools do not cover. One example is Holistic HPC Workflows — HPC workflows comprising multiple codes, paradigms, or platforms that are not developed using a workflow management system. To diagnose the performance of these applications, we define a new metric called Workflow Critical Path (WCP), a data-oriented metric for Holistic HPC Workflows. WCP constructs graphs that span across the workflow codes and platforms, using data states as vertices and data mutations as edges. Using cloud-based technologies, we implement a prototype called Crux, a distributed analysis tool for calculating and visualizing WCP. Our experiments with a workflow simulator on Amazon Web Services show Crux is scalable and capable of correctly calculating WCP for common Holistic HPC workflow patterns. We explore the use of WCP and discuss how Crux could be used in a production HPC environment.

With the society’s growing adoption of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) for various intelligent solutions, it becomes increasingly imperative to standardize a common set of measures for ML/DL models with large scale open datasets under common development practices and resources so that people can benchmark and compare models’ quality and performance on a common ground. MLCommons has emerged recently as a driving force from both industry and academia to orchestrate such an effort. Despite its wide adoption as standardized benchmarks, MLCommons Inference has only included a limited number of ML/DL models (in fact seven models in total). This significantly limits the generality of MLCommons Inference’s benchmarking results because there are many more novel ML/DL models from the research community, solving a wide range of problems with different inputs and outputs modalities. To address such a limitation, we propose MLHarness, a scalable benchmarking harness system for MLCommons Inference with three distinctive features: (1) it codifies the standard benchmark process as defined by MLCommons Inference including the models, datasets, DL frameworks, and software and hardware systems; (2) it provides an easy and declarative approach for model developers to contribute their models and datasets to MLCommons Inference; and (3) it includes the support of a wide range of models with varying inputs/outputs modalities so that we can scalably benchmark these models across different datasets, frameworks, and hardware systems. This harness system is developed on top of the MLModelScope system, and will be open sourced to the community. Our experimental results demonstrate the superior flexibility and scalability of this harness system for MLCommons Inference benchmarking. Research articleOpen access

The smartphone hardware and software ecosystems have evolved very rapidly. Multiple innovations in the system software, including OS, languages, and runtimes have been made in the last decade. Although, performance characterization of microarchitecture has been done, there is little analysis available for application performance bottlenecks of the system software stack, especially for contemporary applications on mobile operating systems.

In this work, we perform system utilization analysis from a software perspective, thereby supplementing the hardware perspective offered by prior work. We focus our analysis on Android powered smartphones, running newer versions of Android. Using 11 representative apps and regions of interest within them, we carry out performance analysis of the entire Android software stack to identify system performance bottlenecks.

We observe that for the majority of apps, the most time-consuming system level thread is a frame rendering thread. However, more surprisingly, our results indicate that all apps spend a significant amount of time doing Inter Process Communication (IPC), hinting that the Android IPC stack is a ripe target for performance optimization via software development and a potential target for hardware acceleration.

With the development of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) technique, vast volumes of digital clinical data are generated. Based on the data, many methods are developed to improve the performance of clinical predictions. Among those methods, Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have been proven outstanding with respect to accuracy by employing many patient instances and events (features). However, each patient-specific event requires time and money. Collecting too many features before making a decision is insufferable, especially for time-critical tasks such as mortality prediction. So it is essential to predict with high accuracy using as minimal clinical events as possible, which makes feature selection a critical question. This paper presents detailed benchmarking results of various feature selection methods, applying different classification and regression algorithms for clinical prediction tasks, including mortality prediction, length of stay prediction, and ICD-9 code group prediction. We use the publicly available dataset, Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-III), in our experiments. Our results show that Genetic Algorithm (GA) based methods perform well with only a few features and outperform others. Besides, for the mortality prediction task, the feature subset selected by GA for one classifier can also be used to others while achieving good performance.

Deep learning (DL) workloads and their performance at scale are becoming important factors to consider as we design, develop and deploy next-generation high-performance computing systems. Since DL applications rely heavily on DL frameworks and underlying compute (CPU/GPU) stacks, it is essential to gain a holistic understanding from compute kernels, models, and frameworks of popular DL stacks, and to assess their impact on science-driven, mission-critical applications. At Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), we employ a set of micro and macro DL benchmarks established through the Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Livermore (CORAL) to evaluate the AI readiness of our next-generation supercomputers. In this paper, we present our early observations and performance benchmark comparisons between the Nvidia V100 based Summit system with its CUDA stack and an AMD MI100 based testbed system with its ROCm stack. We take a layered perspective on DL benchmarking and point to opportunities for future optimizations in the technologies that we consider.

Diagnosing storage system failures is challenging even for professionals. One recent example is the “When Solid State Drives Are Not That Solid” incident occurred at Algolia data center, where Samsung SSDs were mistakenly blamed for failures caused by a Linux kernel bug. With the system complexity keeps increasing, diagnosing failures will likely become more difficult.

To better understand real-world failures and the potential limitations of state-of-the-art tools, we first conduct an empirical study on 277 user-reported storage failures in this paper. We characterize the issues along multiple dimensions (e.g., time to resolve, kernel components involved), which provides a quantitative measurement of the challenge in practice. Moreover, we analyze a set of the storage issues in depth and derive a benchmark suite called . The benchmark suite includes the necessary workloads and software environments to reproduce 9 storage failures, covers 4 different file systems and the block I/O layer of the storage stack, and enables realistic evaluation of diverse kernel-level tools for debugging.

To demonstrate the usage, we apply to study two representative tools for debugging. We focus on measuring the observations that the tools enable developers to make (i.e., observability), and derive concrete metrics to measure the observability qualitatively and quantitatively. Our measurement demonstrates the different design tradeoffs in terms of debugging information and overhead. More importantly, we observe that both tools may behave abnormally when applied to diagnose a few tricky cases. Also, we find that neither tool can provide low-level information on how the persistent storage states are changed, which is essential for understanding storage failures. To address the limitation, we develop lightweight extensions to enable such functionality in both tools. We hope that and the enabled measurements will inspire follow-up research in benchmarking and tool support and help address the challenge of failure diagnosis in general.

In this study, we present an efficient parallel sparse approximate inverse (SPAI) preconditioning algorithm based on MPI and CUDA, called HybridSPAI. For HybridSPAI, it optimizes a latest static SPAI preconditioning algorithm, and is extended from one GPU to multiple GPUs in order to process large-scale matrices. We make the following significant contributions: (1) a general parallel framework for optimizing the static SPAI preconditioner based on MPI and CUDA is presented, and (2) for each component of the preconditioner, a decision tree is established to choose the optimal kernel of computing it. Experimental results show that HybridSPAI is effective, and outperforms the popular preconditioning algorithms in two public libraries, and a latest parallel SPAI preconditioning algorithm.

With the widespread application of artificial intelligence technology in the field of biomedical images, the deep learning-based detection of vaginal discharge, an important but challenging topic in medical image processing, has drawn an increasing amount of research interest. Although the past few decades have witnessed major advances in object detection of natural scenes, such successes have been slow to medical images, not only because of the complex background and diverse cell morphology in the microscope images, but also due to the scarcity of well-annotated datasets of objects in medical images. Until now, in most hospitals in China, the vaginal diseases are often checked by observation of cell morphology using the microscope manually, or observation of the color reaction experiment by inspectors, which are time-consuming, inefficient and easily interfered by subjective factors. To this end, we elaborately construct the first large-scale dataset of microscopic vaginal discharge images, named MVDI25K, which consists of 25,708 images covering 10 cell categories related to vaginal discharge detection. All the images in MVDI25K dataset are carefully annotated by experts with bounding-box and object-level labels. In addition, we conduct a systematical benchmark experiments on MVDI25K dataset with 10 representative state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep models focusing on two key tasks, i.e., object detection and object segmentation. Our research offers the community an opportunity to explore more in this new field.

The huge storage and computation cost of convolutional neural networks (CNN) make them challenging to meet the real-time inference requirement in many applications. Existing channel pruning methods mainly focus on removing unimportant channels in a CNN model based on rule-of-thumb designs, using reduced floating-point operations (FLOPs) and parameter numbers to measure the pruning quality. The inference latency of pruned models is often overlooked. In this paper, we propose a latency-aware automatic CNN channel pruning method (LACP), which aims to search low latency and accurate pruned network structure automatically. We evaluate the inaccuracy of measuring pruning quality by FLOPs and the number of parameters, and use the model inference latency as the direct optimization metric. To bridge model pruning and inference acceleration, we analyze the inference latency of convolutional layers on GPU. Results show that the inference latency of convolutional layers exhibits a staircase pattern along with channel number due to the GPU tail effect. Based on that observation, we greatly shrink the search space of network structures. Then we apply an evolutionary procedure to search a computationally efficient pruned network structure, which reduces the inference latency and maintains the model accuracy. Experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods on three image classification datasets show that our method can achieve better inference acceleration with less accuracy loss.

All modern distributed systems list performance and scalability as their core strengths. Given that optimal performance requires carefully selecting configuration options, and typical cluster sizes can range anywhere from 2 to 300 nodes, it is rare for any two clusters to be exactly the same. Validating the behavior and performance of distributed systems in this large configuration space is challenging without automation that stretches across the software stack. In this paper we present Fallout, an open-source distributed systems testing service that automatically provisions and configures distributed systems and clients, supports running a variety of workloads and benchmarks, and generates performance reports based on collected metrics for visual analysis. We have been running the Fallout service internally at DataStax for over 5 years and have recently open sourced it to support our work with Apache Cassandra, Pulsar, and other open source projects. We describe the architecture of Fallout along with the evolution of its design and the lessons we learned operating this service in a dynamic environment where teams work on different products and favor different benchmarking tools.

Software patches are made available to fix security vulnerabilities, enhance performance, and usability. Previous works focused on measuring the performance effect of patches on benchmark runtimes. In this study, we used the Top-Down microarchitecture analysis method to understand how pipeline bottlenecks were affected by the application of the Spectre and Meltdown security patches. Bottleneck analysis makes it possible to better understand how different hardware resources are being utilized, highlighting portions of the pipeline where possible improvements could be achieved. We complement the Top-Down analysis technique with the use a normalization technique from the field of economics, purchasing power parity (PPP), to better understand the relative difference between patched and unpatched runs. In this study, we showed that security patches had an effect that was reflected on the corresponding Top-Down metrics. We showed that recent compilers are not as negatively affected as previously reported. Out of the 14 benchmarks that make up the SPEC OMP2012 suite, three had noticeable slowdowns when the patches were applied. We also found that Top-Down metrics had large relative differences when the security patches were applied, differences that standard techniques based in absolute, non-normalized, metrics failed to highlight.

This report introduces the awards presented by the International Open Benchmark Council (BenchCouncil) in 2021 and highlights the award selection rules, committee, awardees, and their contributions.