Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2105.08694

Towards Performance Clarity of Edge Video Analytics

Abstract

Edge video analytics is becoming the solution to many safety and management tasks. Its wide deployment, however, must first address the tension between inference accuracy and resource (compute/network) cost. This has led to the development of video analytics pipelines (VAPs), which reduce resource cost by combining DNN compression/speedup techniques with video processing heuristics. Our measurement study on existing VAPs, however, shows that today's methods for evaluating VAPs are incomplete, often producing premature conclusions or ambiguous results. This is because each VAP's performance varies substantially across videos and time (even under the same scenario) and is sensitive to different subsets of video content characteristics. We argue that accurate VAP evaluation must first characterize the complex interaction between VAPs and video characteristics, which we refer to as VAP performance clarity. We design and implement Yoda, the first VAP benchmark to achieve performance clarity. Using primitive-based profiling and a carefully curated benchmark video set, Yoda builds a performance clarity profile for each VAP to precisely define its accuracy/cost tradeoff and its relationship with video characteristics. We show that Yoda substantially improves VAP evaluations by (1) providing a comprehensive, transparent assessment of VAP performance and its dependencies on video characteristics; (2) explicitly identifying fine-grained VAP behaviors that were previously hidden by large performance variance; and (3) revealing strengths/weaknesses among different VAPs and new design opportunities.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Zhujun Xiao, Zhengxu Xia, Haitao Zheng, Ben Y. Zhao, Junchen Jiang. 2021-05-18. Towards Performance Clarity of Edge Video Analytics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.08694

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Performance Analysis of Low-Order, GPU-accelerated Finite Element Kernels using Kokkos

We study performance portability for low-order, matrix-free finite element kernels, using the example of a vectorial, variable-coefficient PDE operator originating in geophysical models. Written in Kokkos, the kernel is compared on NVIDIA H100, AMD MI250X, AMD MI300A and Intel PVC Max 1550 GPUs. Owing to its low order and to optimizations that reduce the arithmetic, the kernel has a low arithmetic intensity, so that its performance is determined by how the finite element assembly is mapped onto the memory hierarchy. This is a dimension in which the architectures differ even within one vendor family, causing different performance characteristics. We examine how Kokkos' hierarchical parallelism and shared scratch memory, which are used for the shared degrees of freedom of the conforming discretization, behave on each device. Finally, we show how portability gaps can be narrowed with tuning levers such as the size of the thread groups, the balance between occupancy and register use, and the atomic accumulation strategy at the end of the kernel.

cs.PF

PrefixBench-H100: Characterizing Prefix Reuse and Time-to-First-Token in H100 LLM Serving

Repeated prompt prefixes are increasingly common in LLM serving workloads, appearing in system prompts, templated retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, agent frameworks, and multi-turn conversations. Modern inference runtimes such as vLLM and TensorRT-LLM provide mechanisms for reusing previously computed KV-cache state across requests, yet it remains unclear when prefix reuse materially improves serving performance on contemporary accelerators and when its benefits are limited by scheduling, cache granularity, concurrency, or memory pressure. This paper presents PrefixBench-H100, a reproducible benchmark and measurement framework for characterizing prefix reuse on a single NVIDIA H100. PrefixBench-H100 combines controlled synthetic traces with chat-style and retrieval-style workloads, and evaluates two widely used LLM serving runtimes under matched workload conditions. The benchmark varies shared-prefix length, suffix diversity, request arrival pattern, concurrency, output length, and cache configuration, while collecting time-to-first-token, inter-token latency, end-to-end latency, throughput, cache-hit statistics, GPU memory usage, and selected profiling traces. The goal of PrefixBench-H100 is not to introduce a new caching algorithm, but to expose the practical operating envelope of prefix reuse for H100-class LLM serving. The study identifies the regime where prefix reuse provides substantial first-token latency reductions and the regime where cache pressure erodes them, while showing that cache effectiveness itself is largely insensitive to concurrency and output length; the cross-runtime differences that remain arise above the cache, in the scheduling layer.

cs.PF

Whittle index approach to multi-server scheduling with convex delay costs and impatient customers

We consider the dynamic scheduling problem in a multi-class M/G/N + M queue with convex delay costs and impatient customers that have exponential abandonment times. We apply the Whittle index approach to find a reasonable heuristic solution for this tricky problem. By assuming exponential abandonment times, we are able to make a very straightforward use of the results of the corresponding problem with patient customers presented in Queueing Systems, Vol. 110, Article no. 2, 2026. Our main theoretical achievements are proving that the closed version of the corresponding discrete-time problem is indexable and deriving an explicit expression for the Whittle index. The discrete-time results are utilized to develop the Whittle index policy for the original continuous-time scheduling problem.

cs.PF