
Performance of the Dell PowerEdge R750xa Server for MLPerf™ Inference v2.0
Thu, 21 Apr 2022 18:20:33 -0000
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Abstract
Dell Technologies recently submitted results to the MLPerf Inference v2.0 benchmark suite. The results provide information about the performance of Dell servers. This blog takes a closer look at the Dell PowerEdge R750xa server and its performance for MLPerf Inference v1.1 and v2.0.
We compare the v1.1 results with the v2.0 results. We show the performance difference between the software stack versions. We also use the PowerEdge R750xa server to demonstrate that the v1.1 results from all systems can be referenced for planning an ML workload on systems that are not available for MLPerf Inference v2.0.
PowerEdge R750xa server
Built with state-of-the-art components, the PowerEdge R750xa server is ideal for artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) workloads. The PowerEdge R750xa server is the GPU-optimized version of the PowerEdge R750 server. It supports accelerators as 4 x 300 W DW or 6 x 75 W SW. The GPUs are placed in the front of the PowerEdge R750xa server allowing for better airflow management. It has up to eight available PCIe Gen4 slots and supports up to eight NVMe SSDs.
The following figures show the PowerEdge R750xa server (source):
Figure 1: Front view of the PowerEdge R750xa server
Figure 2: Rear view of the PowerEdge R750xa server
Figure 3: Top view of the PowerEdge R750xa server
Configuration comparison
The following table describes the software stack configurations from the two rounds of submission for the closed data center division:
Table 1: MLPerf Inference v1.1 and v2.0 software stacks
NVIDIA component | v1.1 software stack | v2.0 software stack |
TensorRT | 8.0.2 | 8.4.0 |
CUDA | 11.3 | 11.6 |
cuDNN | 8.2.1 | 8.3.2 |
GPU driver | 470.42.01 | 510.39.01 |
DALI | 0.30.0 | 0.31.0 |
Triton | 21.07 | 22.01 |
Although the software has been updated across the two rounds of submission, performance is consistent, if not better, for the v2.0 submission. For MLPerf Inference v2.0, Triton performance results can be extrapolated from MLPerf Inference v1.1 except for the 3D U-Net benchmark, which is due to a v2.0 dataset change.
The following table describes the System Under Test (SUT) configurations from MLPerf Inference v1.1 and v2.0 of data center inference submissions:
Table 2: MLPerf Inference v1.1 and v2.0 system configuration of the PowerEdge R750xa server
Component | v1.1 system configuration | v2.0 system configuration |
Platform | R750xa 4x A100-PCIE-80GB, TensorRT | R750xa 4xA100 TensorRT |
MLPerf system ID | R750xa_A100-PCIE-80GBx4_TRT | R750xa_A100_PCIE_80GBx4_TRT |
Operating system | CentOS 8.2 | |
CPU | Intel Xeon Gold 6338 CPU @ 2.00 GHz | |
Memory | 1 TB | |
GPU | NVIDIA A100-PCIE-80GB | |
GPU form factor | PCIe | |
GPU count | 4 | |
Software stack | TensorRT 8.0.2 | TensorRT 8.4.0 CUDA 11.6 cuDNN 8.3.2 Driver 510.39.01 DALI 0.31.0 |
In the v1.1 round of submission, Dell Technologies submitted four different configurations on the PowerEdge R750xa server. Although the GPU count of four was maintained, Dell Technologies submitted the 40 GB and the 80 GB versions of the NVIDIA A100 GPU. Additionally, Dell Technologies submitted Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) numbers using 28 instances of the one compute instance of the 10gb memory profile on the 80 GB A100 GPU. Furthermore, Dell Technologies submitted power numbers (MaxQ is a performance and power submission) for the 40 GB version of the A100 GPU and submitted with the Triton server on the 80 GB version of the A100 GPU. A discussion about the v1.1 submission by Dell Technologies can be found in this blog.
Performance comparison of the PowerEdge R70xa server for MLPerf Inference v2.0 and v1.1
ResNet 50
ReNet50 is a 50-layer deep convolution neural network that is made up of 48 convolution layers along with a single max pool and average pool layer. This model is used for computer vision applications including image classification, object detection, and object classification. For the ResNet 50 benchmark, the performance numbers from the v2.0 submission match and outperform in the server and offline scenarios respectively when compared to the v1.1 round of submission. As shown in the following figure, the v2.0 submission results are within 0.02 percent in the server scenario and outperform the previous round by 1 percent in the offline scenario:
Figure 4: MLPerf Inference v2.0 compared to v1.1 ResNet 50 per card results on the PowerEdge R750xa server
BERT
Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) is a state-of-the-art language representational model for Natural Language Processing applications. This benchmark performs the SQuAD question answering task. The BERT benchmark consists of default and high accuracy modes for the offline and server scenarios. In the v2.0 round of submission, the PowerEdge R750xa server matched and slightly outperformed its performance from the previous round. In the default BERT server and offline scenarios, the extracted performance is within 0.06 and 2.33 percent respectively. In the high accuracy BERT server and offline scenarios, the extracted performance is within 0.14 and 1.25 percent respectively.
Figure 5: MLPerf Inference v2.0 compared to v1.1 BERT per card results on the PowerEdge R750xa server
SSD-ResNet 34
The SSD-ResNet 34 model falls under the computer vision category. This benchmark performs object detection. For the SSD-ResNet 34 benchmark, the results produced in the v2.0 round of submission are within 0.14 percent for the server scenario and show a 1 percent improvement in the offline scenario.
Figure 6: MLPerf Inference v2.0 compared to v1.1 SSD-ResNet 34 per card results on the PowerEdge R750xa server
DLRM
Deep Learning Recommendation Model (DLRM) is an effective benchmark for understanding workload requirements for building recommender systems. This model uses collaborative filtering and predicative analysis-based approaches to process large amounts of data. The DLRM benchmark consists of default and high accuracy modes, both containing the server and offline scenarios. For the server scenario in both the default and high accuracy modes, the v2.0 submissions results are within 0.003 percent. For the offline scenario across both modes, the PowerEdge R750xa server showed a 2.62 percent performance gain.
Figure 7: MLPerf Inference v2.0 compared to v1.1 DLRM per card results on the PowerEdge R750xa server
RNNT
The Recurrent Neural Network Transducers (RNNT) model falls under the speech recognition category. This benchmark accepts raw audio samples and produces the corresponding character transcription. For the RNNT benchmark, the PowerEdge R750xa server maintained similar performance behavior within 0.04 percent in the server mode and showing 1.46 percent performance gains in the offline mode.
Figure 8: MLPerf Inference v2.0 compared to v1.1 RNNT per card results on the PowerEdge R750xa server
3D U-Net
The 3D U-Net performance numbers have changed in terms of scale and are not comparable in a bar graph because of a change to the dataset. The new dataset for this model is the Kitts 2019 Kidney Tumor Segmentation set. However, the PowerEdge R750xa server yielded Number One results among the PCIe form factor systems that were submitted. This model falls under the computer vision category, but it specifically deals with medical image data.
Results summary
Figure 1 through Figure 8 show the consistent performance of the PowerEdge R750xa server across both rounds of submission.
The following figure shows that in the offline scenarios for the benchmarks there is a small but noticeable performance improvement:
Figure 9: Performance improvement in percentage of the PowerEdge R750xa server across MLPerf Inference v2.0 and v1.1
The small percentage delta in the server scenarios can be a result of noise and are consistent with the previous round of submission.
Conclusion
This blog confirms the consistent performance of the Dell PowerEdge R750xa server across the MLPerf Inference v1.1 and MLPerf Inference v2.0 submissions. Because an identical system from round v1.1 performed at a consistent level for MLPerf Inference v2.0, we see that the software stack upgrades had minimal impact on performance. Therefore, the optimal results from the v1.1 round of submission can be used for making informed decisions about server performance for a specific ML workload. Because Dell Technologies submitted a diverse set of configurations in the v1.1 round of submission, customers can take advantage of many results.
Related Blog Posts

Dell Servers Excel in MLPerf™ Training v2.1
Wed, 16 Nov 2022 10:07:33 -0000
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Dell Technologies has completed the successful submission of MLPerf Training, which marks the seventh round of submission to MLCommons™. This blog provides an overview and highlights the performance of the Dell PowerEdge R750xa, XE8545, and DSS8440 servers that were used for the submission.
What’s new in MLPerf Training v2.1?
This round of submission does not include new benchmarks or changes in the existing benchmarks. A change is introduced in the submission compliance checker.
This round adds one-sided normalization to the checker to reduce variance in the number of steps to converge. This change means that if a result converges faster than the RCP mean within a certain range, the checker normalizes the results to the RCP mean. This normalization was not available in earlier rounds of submission.
What’s new in MLPerf Training v2.1 with Dell submissions?
For Dell submission for MLPerf Training v2.1, we included:
- Improved performance with BERT and Mask R-CNN models
- Minigo submission results on Dell PowerEdge R750xa server with A100 PCIe GPUs
Overall Dell Submissions
Figure 1. Overall submissions for all Dell PowerEdge servers in MLPerf Training v2.1
Figure 1 shows our submission in which the workloads span across image classification, lightweight and heavy object detection, speech recognition, natural language processing, recommender systems, medical image segmentation, and reinforcement learning. There were different NVIDIA GPUs including the A100, with PCIe and SXM4 form factors having 40 GB and 80 GB VRAM and A30.
The Minigo on the PowerEdge R750xa server is a first-time submission, and it takes around 516 minutes to run to target quality. That submission has 4x A100 PCIe 80 GB GPUs.
Our results have increased in count from 41 to 45. This increased number of submissions helps customers see the performance of the systems using different PowerEdge servers, GPUs, and CPUs. With more results, customers can expect to see the influence of using different hardware settings that can play a vital role in time to convergence.
We have several procured winning titles that demonstrate the higher performance of our systems in relation to other submitters, starting with the highest number of results across all the submitters. Some other titles include the top position in the time to converge for BERT, ResNet, and Mask R-CNN with our PowerEdge XE8545 server powered by NVIDIA A100-40GB GPUs.
Improvement in Performance for BERT and Mask R-CNN
Figure 2. Performance gains from MLPerf v2.0 to MLPerf v2.1 running BERT
Figure 2 shows the improvements seen with the PowerEdge R750xa and PowerEdge XE8545 servers with A100 GPUs from MLPerf training v2.0 to MLPerf training v2.1 running BERT language model workload. The PowerEdge XE8545 server with A100-80GB has the fastest time to convergence and the highest improvement at 13.1 percent, whereas the PowerEdge XE8545 server with A100-40GB has 7.74 percent followed by the PowerEdge R750xa server with A100-PCIe at 5.35 percent.
Figure 3. Performance gains from MLPerf v2.0 to MLPerf v2.1 running Mask R-CNN
Figure 3 shows the improvements seen with the PowerEdge XE8545 server with A100 GPUs. There is a 3.31 percent improvement in time to convergence with MLPerf v2.1.
For both BERT and Mask R-CNN, the improvements are software-based. These results show that software-only improvements can reduce convergence time. Customers can benefit from similar improvements without any changes in their hardware environment.
The following sections compare the performance differences between SXM and PCIe form factor GPUs.
Performance Difference Between PCIe and SXM4 Form Factor with A100 GPUs
Figure 4. SXM4 form factor compared to PCIe for the BERT
Figure 5. SXM4 form factor compared to PCIe for Resnet50 v1.5
Figure 6. SXM4 form factor compared to PCIe for the RNN-T
Table 1:
System | BERT | Resnet50 | RNN-T |
R750xax4A100-PCIe-80GB | 48.95 | 61.27 | 66.19 |
XE8545x4A100-SXM-80GB | 32.79 | 54.23 | 55.08 |
Percentage difference | 39.54% | 12.19% | 18.32% |
Figures 4, 5, and 6 and Table 1 show that SXM form factor is faster than the PCIe form factor for BERT, Resnet50 v1.5, and RNN-T workloads.
The SXM form factor typically consumes more power and is faster than PCIe. For the above workloads, the minimum percentage improvement in convergence that customers can expect is in double digits, ranging from approximately 12 percent to 40 percent, depending on the workload.
Multinode Results Comparison
Multinode performance assessment is more important than ever. With the advent of large models and different parallelism techniques, customers have an ever-increasing need to find results faster. Therefore, we have submitted several multinode results to assess scaling performance.
Figure 7. BERT multinode results with PowerEdge R750xa and XE8545 servers
Figure 7 indicates multinode results from three different systems with the following configurations:
- R750xa with 4 A100-PCIe-80GB GPUs
- XE8545 with 4 A100-SXM-40GB GPUs
- XE8545 with 4 A100-SXM-80GB GPUs
Every node of the above system has four GPUs each. When the graph shows eight GPUs, it means that the performance results are derived from two nodes. Similarly, for 16 GPUs the results are derived from four nodes, and so on.
Figure 8. Resnet50 multinode results with R750xa and XE8545 servers
Figure 9. Mask R-CNN multinode results with R750xa and XE8545 servers
As shown in Figures 7, 8, and 9, the multinode scaling results of the BERT, Resnet50, and Mask R-CNN are linear or nearly linear scaled. This shows that Dell servers offer outstanding performance with single-node and multinode scaling.
Conclusion
The findings described in this blog show that:
- Dell servers can run all types of workloads in the MLPerf Training submission.
- Software-only enhancements reduce time to solution for our customers, as shown in our MLPerf Training v2.1 submission, and customers can expect to see improvements in their environments.
- Dell PowerEdge XE8545 and PowerEdge R750xa servers with NVIDIA A100 with PCIe and SXM4 form factors are both great selections for all deep learning models.
- PCIe-based PowerEdge R750xa servers can deliver reinforcement learning workloads in addition to other classes of workloads, such as image classification, lightweight and heavy object detection, speech recognition, natural language processing, and medical image segmentation.
- The single-node results of our submission indicate that Dell servers deliver outstanding performance and that multinode run scales well and helps to reduce time to solution across a distinct set of workload types, making Dell servers apt for single-node and multinode deep learning training workloads.
- The single-node results of our submission indicate that Dell servers deliver outstanding performance and that multinode results show a well-scaled performance that helps to reduce time to solution across a distinct set of workload types. This makes Dell servers apt for both small training workloads on single nodes and large deep learning training workloads on multinodes.
Appendix
System Under Test
MLPerf system configurations for PowerEdge XE8545 systems
Operating system | CPU | Memory | GPU | GPU form factor | GPU count | Networking | Software stack |
XE8545x4A100-SXM-40GB 2xXE8545x4A100-SXM-40GB 4xXE8545x4A100-SXM-40GB 8xXE8545x4A100-SXM-40GB 16xXE8545x4A100-SXM-40GB 32xXE8545x4A100-SXM-40GB | 2x ConnectX-6 IB HDR 200Gb/Sec
|
| |||||
Red Hat Enterprise Linux | AMD EPYC 7713 | 1 TB | NVIDIA A100-SXM-40GB | SXM4 | 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 |
| CUDA 11.6 Driver 510.47.03 cuBLAS 11.9.2.110 cuDNN 8.4.0.27 TensorRT 8.0.3 DALI 1.5.0 NCCL 2.12.10 Open MPI 4.1.1rc1 MOFED 5.4-1.0.3.0 |
XE8545x4A100-SXM-80GB |
|
| |||||
Ubuntu 20.04.4 | AMD EPYC 7763 | 1 TB | NVIDIA A100-SXM-80GB | SXM4 | 4 |
| CUDA 11.6 Driver 510.47.03 cuBLAS 11.9.2.110 cuDNN 8.4.0.27 TensorRT 8.0.3 DALI 1.5.0 NCCL 2.12.10 Open MPI 4.1.1rc1 MOFED 5.4-1.0.3.0 |
2xXE8545x4A100-SXM-80GB 4xXE8545x4A100-SXM-80GB |
|
| |||||
Red Hat Enterprise Linux | AMD EPYC 7713 | 1 TB | NVIDIA A100-SXM-80GB | SXM4 | 4, 8 |
| CUDA 11.6 Driver 510.47.03 cuBLAS 11.9.2.110 cuDNN 8.4.0.27 TensorRT 8.0.3 DALI 1.5.0 NCCL 2.12.10 Open MPI 4.1.1rc1 MOFED 5.4-1.0.3.0 |
MLPerf system configurations for Dell PowerEdge R750xa servers
| 2xR750xa_A100 | 8xR750xa_A100 |
MLPerf System ID | 2xR750xax4A100-PCIE-80GB | 8xR750xax4A100-PCIE-80GB |
Operating system | CentOS 8.2.2004 | |
CPU | Intel Xeon Gold 6338 | |
Memory | 512 GB | |
GPU | NVIDIA A100-PCIE-80GB | |
GPU form factor | PCIe | |
GPU count | 4,32 | |
Networking | 1x ConnectX-5 IB EDR 100Gb/Sec | |
Software stack | CUDA 11.6 Driver 470.42.01 cuBLAS 11.9.2.110 cuDNN 8.4.0.27 TensorRT 8.0.3 DALI 1.5.0 NCCL 2.12.10 Open MPI 4.1.1rc1 MOFED 5.4-1.0.3.0 | CUDA 11.6 Driver 470.42.01 cuBLAS 11.9.2.110 cuDNN 8.4.0.27 TensorRT 8.0.3 DALI 1.5.0 NCCL 2.12.10 Open MPI 4.1.1rc1 MOFED 5.4-1.0.3.0 |
MLPerf system configurations Dell DSS 8440 servers
| DSS 8440 |
MLPerf System ID | DSS8440x8A30-NVBRIDGE |
Operating system | CentOS 8.2.2004 |
CPU | Intel Xeon Gold 6248R |
Memory | 768 GB |
GPU | NVIDIA A30 |
GPU form factor | PCIe |
GPU count | 8 |
Networking | 1x ConnectX-5 IB EDR 100Gb/Sec |
Software stack | CUDA 11.6 Driver 510.47.03 cuBLAS 11.9.2.110 cuDNN 8.4.0.27 TensorRT 8.0.3 DALI 1.5.0 NCCL 2.12.10 Open MPI 4.1.1rc1 MOFED 5.4-1.0.3.0 |

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.