MLPerf™ v1.1 Inference on Virtualized and Multi-Instance GPUs
Mon, 16 May 2022 18:49:23 -0000
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Introduction
Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) provide exceptional acceleration to power modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning (DL) workloads. GPU resource allocation and isolation are some of the key components that data scientists working in a shared environment use to run their DL experiments effectively. The need for this allocation and isolation becomes apparent when a single user uses only a small percentage of the GPU, resulting in underutilized resources. Due to the complexity of the design and architecture, maximizing the use of GPU resources in shared environments has been a challenge. The introduction of Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) capabilities in the NVIDIA Ampere GPU architecture provides a way to partition NVIDIA A100 GPUs and allow complete isolation between GPU instances. The Dell Validated Design showcases the benefits of virtualization for AI workloads and MIG performance analysis. This design uses the most recent version of VMware vSphere along with the NVIDIA AI Enterprise suite on Dell PowerEdge servers and VxRail Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI). Also, the architecture incorporates Dell PowerScale storage that supplies the required analytical performance and parallelism at scale to feed the most data-hungry AI algorithms reliably.
In this blog, we examine some key concepts, setup, and MLPerf Inference v1.1 performance characterization for VMs hosted on Dell PowerEdge R750xa servers configured with MIG profiles on NVIDIA A100 80 GB GPUs. We compare the inference results for the ResNet50 and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) models.
Key Concepts
Key concepts include:
- Multi-Instance GPU (MIG)—MIG capability is an innovative technology released with the NVIDIA A100 GPU that enables partitioning of the A100 GPU up to seven instances or independent MIG devices. Each MIG device operates in parallel and is equipped with its own memory, cache, and streaming multiprocessors.
In the following figure, each block shows a possible MIG device configuration in a single A100 80 GB GPU:
Figure 1- MIG device configuration - A100 80 GB GPU
The figure illustrates the physical location of GPU instances after they have been instantiated on the GPU. Because GPU instances are generated and destroyed at various locations, fragmentation might occur. The physical location of one GPU instance influences whether more GPU instances can be formed next to it.
Supported profiles for the A100 80GB GPU include:
- 1g.10gb
- 2g.20gb
- 3g.40gb
- 4g.40gb
- 7g.80gb
In Figure 1, a valid combination is constructed by beginning with an instance profile on the left and progressing to the right, ensuring that no two profiles overlap vertically. For detailed information about NVIDIA MIG profiles, see the NVIDIA Multi-Instance GPU User Guide.
- MLPERF—MLCommons™ is a consortium of leading researchers in AI from academia, research labs, and industry. Its mission is to "develop fair and useful benchmarks" that provide unbiased evaluations of training and inference performance for hardware, software, and services—all under controlled conditions. The foundation for MLCommons began with the MLPerf benchmark in 2018, which rapidly scaled as a set of industry metrics to measure machine learning performance and promote transparency of machine learning techniques. To stay current with industry trends, MLPerf is always evolving, conducting new tests, and adding new workloads that represent the state of the art in AI.
Setup for MLPerf Inference
A system under test consists of an ESXi host that can be operated from vSphere.
System details
The following table provides the system details.
Table 1: System details
Server | Dell PowerEdge R750xa (NVIDIA-Certified System) |
Processor | 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6338 CPU @ 2.00 GHz |
GPU | 4 x NVIDIA A100 PCIe (PCI Express) 80 GB |
Network adapter | Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dual Port 100 GbE |
Storage | Dell PowerScale |
ESXi version | 7.0.3 |
BIOS version | 1.1.3 |
GPU driver version | 470.82.01 |
CUDA version | 11.4 |
System configuration for MLPerf Inference
The configuration for MLPerf Inference on a virtualized environment requires the following steps:
- Boot the host with ESXi (see Installing ESXi on the management hosts), install the NVIDIA bootbank driver, enable MIG, and restart the host.
- Create a virtual machine (VM) on the ESXi host with EFI boot mode (see Using GPUs with Virtual Machines on vSphere – Part 2: VMDirectPath I/O) and add the following advanced configuration settings:
pciPassthru.use64bitMMIO: TRUE pciPassthru.allowP2P: TRUE pciPassthru.64bitMMIOSizeGB: 64
- Change the VM settings and add a new PCIe device with a MIG profile (see Using GPUs with Virtual Machines on vSphere – Part 3: Installing the NVIDIA Virtual GPU Technology).
- Boot the Linux-based operating system and run the following steps in the VM.
- Install Docker, CMake (see Installing CMake), the build-essentials package, and CURL
- Download and install the NVIDIA MIG driver (grid driver).
- Install the nvidia-docker repository (see NVIDIA Container Toolkit Installation Guide) for running nvidia-containers.
- Configure the nvidia-grid service to use the vGPU setting on the VM (see Using GPUs with Virtual Machines on vSphere – Part 3: Installing the NVIDIA Virtual GPU Technology) and update the licenses.
- Run the following command to verify that the setup is successful:
nvidia-smi
Note: Each VM consists of 32 vCPUs and 64 GB memory.
MLPerf Inference configuration for MIG
When the system has been configured, configure MLPerf v1.1 on the MIG VMs. To run the MLPerf Inference benchmarks on a MIG-enabled system under test, do the following:
- Add MIG details in the inference configuration file:
Figure 2- Example configuration for running inferences using MIG enabled VMs - Add valid MIG specifications to the system variable in the system_list.py file.
Figure 3- Example system entry with MIG profiles
These steps complete the system setup, which is followed by building the image, generating engines, and running the benchmark. For detailed instructions, see our previous blog about running MLPerf v1.1 on bare metal systems.
MLPerf v1.1 Benchmarking
Benchmarking scenarios
We assessed inference latency and throughput for ResNet50 and BERT models using MLPerf Inference v1.1. The scenarios in the following table identify the number of VMs and corresponding MIG profiles used in performance tests. The total number of tests for each scenario is 57. The results are averaged based on three runs.
Note: We used MLPerf Inference v1.1 for benchmarking but the results shown in this blog are not part of the official MLPerf submissions.
Table 2: Scenarios configuration
Scenario | MIG profiles | Total VMs |
1 | MIG nvidia-7-80c | 1 |
2 | MIG nvidia-4-40c | 1 |
3 | MIG nvidia-3-40c | 1 |
4 | MIG nvidia-2-20c | 1 |
5 | MIG nvidia-1-10c | 1 |
6 | MIG nvidia-4-40c + nvidia-2-20c + nvidia-1-10c | 3 |
7 | MIG nvidia-2-20c + nvidia-2-20c + nvidia-2-20c + nvidia-1-10c | 4 |
8 | MIG nvidia-1-10c* 7 | 7 |
ResNet50
ResNet50 (see Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition) is a widely used deep convolutional neural network for various computer vision applications. This neural network can address the disappearing gradients problem by allowing gradients to traverse the network's layers using the concept of skip connections. The following figure shows an example configuration for ResNet50 inference:
Figure 4- Configuration for running inference using Resnet50 model
The following figure shows ResNet50 inference performance based on the scenarios in Table 2:
Figure 5- ResNet50 Performance throughput of MLPerf Inference v1.1 across various VMs with MIG profiles
Multiple data scientists can use all the available GPU resources while running their individual workloads on separate instances, improving overall system throughput. This result is clearly seen on Scenarios 6 through 8, which contain multiple instances, compared to Scenario 1 which consists of a single instance with the largest MIG profile for A100 80 GB. Scenario 6 achieves the highest overall system throughput (5.77 percent improvement) compared to Scenario 1. Also, Scenario 8 shows seven VMs equipped with individual GPU instances that can be built for up to seven data scientists who can fine-tune their ResNet50 base models.
BERT
BERT (see BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding) is a state-of-the-art language representational model. BERT is essentially a stack of Transformer encoders. It is suitable for neural machine translation, question answering, sentiment analysis, and text summarization, all of which require a working knowledge of the target language.
BERT is trained in two stages:
- Pretrain—During which the model acquires language and context understanding
- Fine-tuning—During which the model acquires task-specific knowledge such as querying and response.
The following figure shows an example configuration for BERT inference:
Figure 6- Configuration for running inference using BERT model
The following figure shows BERT inference performance based on scenarios in Table 2:
Figure 7- BERT Performance throughput of MLPerf Inference v1.1 across various VMs with MIG profiles
Like Resnet50 Inference performance, we clearly see that Scenarios 6 through 8, which contain multiple instances, perform better compared to Scenario 1. Particularly, Scenario 7 achieves the highest overall system throughput (21 percent improvement) compared to Scenario 1 while achieving 99.9 percent accuracy target. Also, Scenario 8 shows seven VMs equipped with individual GPU instances that can be built for up to seven data scientists who want to fine-tune their BERT base models.
Conclusion
In this blog, we describe how to install and configure MLPerf Inference v1.1 on Dell PowerEdge 750xa servers using a VMware-virtualized infrastructure and NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Furthermore, we examine the performance of single- and multi-MIG profiles running on the A100 GPU. If your ML workload is primarily inferencing-focused and response time is not an issue, enabling MIG on the A100 GPU can ensure complete GPU use with maximum throughput. Developers can use VMs with an independent GPU compute allocated to them. Also, in cases where the largest MIG profiles are used, performance is comparable to bare metal systems. Inference results from ResNet50 and BERT models demonstrate that overall system performance using either the whole GPU or multiple VMs with MIG instances hosted on an R750xa system with VMware ESXi and NVIDIA A100 GPUs performed well and produced valid results for MLPerf Inference v1.1. In both the cases, the average throughput and latency are equal. This result confirms that MIG provides predictable latency and throughput independent of other processes operating on the MIG instances on the GPU.
There is a MIG limitation for GPU profiling on the VMs. Due to the shared nature of the hardware performance across all MIG devices, only one GPU profiling session can run on a VM; parallel GPU profiling sessions on a single VM are not possible.
Related Blog Posts
Accelerating Distributed Training in a Multinode Virtualized Environment
Fri, 13 May 2022 13:57:13 -0000
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Introduction
In the age of deep learning (DL), with complex models, it is vital to have a system that allows faster distributed training. Depending on the application, some DL models require more frequent retraining and fine-tuning of the hyperparameters to be deployed in the production environment. It is important to understand the best practices to improve multinode distributed training performance.
Networking is critical in a distributed training setup as there are numerous gradients exchanged between the nodes. The complexity increases as we increase the number of nodes. In the past, we have seen the benefits of using:
- Direct Memory Access (DMA), which enables a device to access host memory without the intervention of CPUs
- Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), which enables access to memory on a remote machine without interrupting the CPU processes on that system
This blog examines performance when direct communication is established between the GPUs in multinode training experiments run on Dell PowerEdge servers with NVIDIA GPUs and VMware vSphere.
GPUDirect RDMA
Introduced as part of Kepler class GPUs and CUDA 5.0, GPUDirect RDMA enables a direct communication path between NVIDIA GPUs and third-party devices such as network interfaces. By establishing direct communication between the GPUs, we can eliminate the critical bottleneck where data needs to be moved into the host system memory before it can be sent over the network, as shown in the following figure:
Figure 1: Direct Communication – GPUDirect RDMA
For more information, see:
System details
The following table provides the system details:
Table 1: System details
Component | Details |
Server | Dell PowerEdge R750xa (NVIDIA-Certified System) |
Processor | 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6338 CPU @ 2.00 GHz |
GPU | 4 x NVIDIA A100 PCIe |
Network adapters | Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dual port 100 GbE and 25 GbE |
Storage | Dell PowerScale |
ESXi version | 7.0.3 |
BIOS version | 1.1.3 |
GPU driver version | 470.82.01 |
CUDA Version | 11.4 |
Setup
The setup for multinode training in a virtualized environment is outlined in our previous blog.
At a high level, after Address Translation Services (ATS) is enabled on VMware ESXi, the VMs, and ConnectX-6 NIC:
- Enable mapping between logical and physical ports.
- Create a Docker container with Mellanox OFED drivers, Open MPI Library, and NVIDIA-optimized TensorFlow.
- Set up a keyless SSH login between VMs
Performance evaluation
For evaluation, we use tf_cnn_benchmarks using the ResNet50 model and synthetic data with a local batch size of 1024. Each VM is configured with 32 vCPUs, 64 GB of memory, and one NVIDIA A100 PCIE 80 GB GPU. The experiments are performed by using a data parallelism approach in a distributed training setup, scaling up to four nodes. The results are based on averaging three experiment runs. Single-node experiments are only for comparison as there is no internode communication.
Note: Use the ibdev2netdev utility to display the installed Mellanox ConnectX-6 card along with the mapping of ports. In the following figures, ON and OFF indicate if the mapping is enabled between logical and physical ports.
The following figure shows performance when scaling up to four nodes using Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dual Port 100 GbE. It is clear that the throughput increases significantly when the mapping is enabled (ON), providing direct communication between NVIDIA GPUs. The two-node experiments show an improvement in throughput of 18.7 percent while the four node experiments improve throughput by 26.7 percent.
Figure 2: 100 GbE network performance
The following figure shows the scaling performance comparison between Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dual Port 100 GbE and Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dual Port 25 GbE while performing distributed training of the ResNet50 model. Using 100 GbE, two-node experiment results show an improved throughput of six percent while four-node experiments show an improved performance of 11.6 percent compared to 25 GbE.
Figure 3: 25 GbE compared to 100 GbE network performance
Conclusion
In this blog, we considered GPUDirect RDMA and a few required steps to setup multinode experiments in the virtualized environment. The results showed that scaling to a larger number of nodes boosts throughput significantly when establishing direct communication between GPUs in a distributed training setup. The blog also showcased the performance comparison between Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dual Port 100 GbE and 25 GbE network adapters used for distributed training of a ResNet50 model.
Choosing a PowerEdge Server and NVIDIA GPUs for AI Inference at the Edge
Fri, 05 May 2023 16:38:19 -0000
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Dell Technologies submitted several benchmark results for the latest MLCommonsTM Inference v3.0 benchmark suite. An objective was to provide information to help customers choose a favorable server and GPU combination for their workload. This blog reviews the Edge benchmark results and provides information about how to determine the best server and GPU configuration for different types of ML applications.
Results overview
For computer vision workloads, which are widely used in security systems, industrial applications, and even in self-driven cars, ResNet and RetinaNet results were submitted. ResNet is an image classification task and RetinaNet is an object detection task. The following figures show that for intensive processing, the NVIDIA A30 GPU, which is a double-wide card, provides the best performance with almost two times more images per second than the NVIDIA L4 GPU. However, the NVIDIA L4 GPU is a single-wide card that requires only 43 percent of the energy consumption of the NVIDIA A30 GPU, considering nominal Thermal Design Power (TDP) of each GPU. This low-energy consumption provides a great advantage for applications that need lower power consumption or in environments that are more challenging to cool. The NVIDIA L4 GPU is the replacement for the best-selling NVIDIA T4 GPU, and provides twice the performance with the same form factor. Therefore, we see that this card is the best option for most Edge AI workloads.
Conversely, the NVIDIA A2 GPU exhibits the most economical price (compared to the NVIDIA A30 GPU's price), power consumption (TDP), and performance levels among all available options in the market. Therefore, if the application is compatible with this GPU, it has the potential to deliver the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).
Figure 1: Performance comparison of NVIDIA A30, L4, T4, and A2 GPUs for the ResNet Offline benchmark
Figure 2: Performance comparison of NVIDIA A30, L4, T4, and A2 GPUs for the RetinaNet Offline benchmark
The 3D-UNet benchmark is the other computer vision image-related benchmark. It uses medical images for volumetric segmentation. We saw the same results for default accuracy and high accuracy. Moreover, the NVIDIA A30 GPU delivered significantly better performance over the NVIDIA L4 GPU. However, the same comparison between energy consumption, space, and cooling capacity discussed previously applies when considering which GPU to use for each application and use case.
Figure 3: Performance comparison of NVIDIA A30, L4, T4, and A2 GPUs for the 3D-UNet Offline benchmark
Another important benchmark is for BERT, which is a Natural Language Processing model that performs tasks such as question answering and text summarization. We observed similar performance differences between the NVIDIA A30, L4, T4, and A2 GPUs. The higher the value, the better.
Figure 4: Performance comparison of NVIDIA A30, L4, T4, and A2 GPUs for the BERT Offline benchmark
MLPerf benchmarks also include latency results, which are the time that systems take to process requests. For some use cases, this processing time can be more critical than the number of requests that can be processed per second. For example, if it takes several seconds to respond to a conversational algorithm or an object detection query that needs a real-time response, this time can be particularly impactful on the experience of the user or application.
As shown in the following figures, the NVIDIA A30 and NVIDIA L4 GPUs have similar latency results. Depending on the workload, the results can vary due to which GPU provides the lowest latency. For customers planning to replace the NVIDIA T4 GPU or seeking a better response time for their applications, the NVIDIA L4 GPU is an excellent option. The NVIDIA A2 GPU can also be used for applications that require low latency because it performed better than the NVIDIA T4 GPU in single stream workloads. The lower the value, the better.
Figure 4: Latency comparison of NVIDIA A30, L4, T4, and A2 GPUs for the ResNet single-stream and multistream benchmark
Figure 5: Latency comparison of NVIDIA A30, L4, T4, and A2 GPUs for the RetinaNet single-stream and multistream benchmark and the BERT single-stream benchmark
Dell Technologies submitted to various benchmarks to help understand which configuration is the most environmentally friendly as the data center’s carbon footprint is a concern today. This concern is relevant because some edge locations have power and cooling limitations. Therefore, it is important to understand performance compared to power consumption.
The following figure affirms that the NVIDIA L4 GPU has equal or better performance per watt compared to the NVIDIA A2 GPU, even with higher power consumption. For Throughput and Perf/watt values, higher is better; for Power(watt) values, lower is better.
Figure 6: NVIDIA L4 and A2 GPU power consumption comparison
Conclusion
With measured workload benchmarks on MLPerf Inference 3.0, we can conclude that all NVIDIA GPUs tested for Edge workloads have characteristics that address several use cases. Customers must evaluate size, performance, latency, power consumption, and price. When choosing which GPU to use and depending on the requirements of the application, one of the evaluated GPUs will provide a better result for the final use case.
Another important conclusion is that the NVIDIA L4 GPU can be considered as an exceptional upgrade for customers and applications running on NVIDIA T4 GPUs. The migration to this new GPU can help consolidate the amount of equipment, reduce the power consumption, and reduce the TCO; one NVIDIA L4 GPU can provide twice the performance of the NVIDIA T4 GPU for some workloads.
Dell Technologies demonstrates on this benchmark the broad Dell portfolio that provides the infrastructure for any type of customer requirement.
The following blogs provide analyses of other MLPerfTM benchmark results:
- Dell Servers Excel in MLPerf™ Inference 3.0 Performance
- Dell Technologies’ NVIDIA H100 SXM GPU submission to MLPerf™ Inference 3.0
- Empowering Enterprises with Generative AI: How Does MLPerf™ Help Support
- Comparison of Top Accelerators from Dell Technologies’ MLPerf™
References
For more information about Dell Power Edge servers, go to the following links:
- Dell’s PowerEdge XR7620 for Telecom/Edge Compute
- Dell’s PowerEdge XR5610 for Telecom/Edge Compute
- PowerEdge XR4520c Compute Sled specification sheet
- PowerEdge XE2420 Spec Sheet
For more information about NVIDIA GPUs, go to the following links:
MLCommonsTM Inference v3.0 results presented in this document are based on following system IDs:
| ID | Submitter | Availability | System |
|---|---|---|---|
2.1-0005 | Dell Technologies | Available | Dell PowerEdge XE2420 (1x T4, TensorRT) |
2.1-0017 | Dell Technologies | Available | Dell PowerEdge XR4520c (1x A2, TensorRT) |
2.1-0018 | Dell Technologies | Available | Dell PowerEdge XR4520c (1x A30, TensorRT) |
2.1-0019 | Dell Technologies | Available | Dell PowerEdge XR4520c (1x A2, MaxQ, TensorRT) |
2.1-0125 | Dell Technologies | Preview | Dell PowerEdge XR5610 (1x L4, TensorRT, MaxQ) |
2.1-0126 | Dell Technologies | Preview | Dell PowerEdge XR7620 (1x L4, TensorRT) |
Table 1: MLPerfTM system IDs