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arXiv · 2107.04140

First-Generation Inference Accelerator Deployment at Facebook

Michael Anderson·Benny Chen·Stephen Chen·Summer Deng·Jordan Fix·Michael Gschwind·Aravind Kalaiah·Changkyu Kim·Jaewon Lee·Jason Liang·Haixin Liu·Yinghai Lu·Jack Montgomery·Arun Moorthy·Satish Nadathur·Sam Naghshineh·Avinash Nayak·Jongsoo Park·Chris Petersen·Martin Schatz·Narayanan Sundaram·Bangsheng Tang·Peter Tang·Amy Yang·Jiecao Yu·Hector Yuen·Ying Zhang·Aravind Anbudurai·Vandana Balan·Harsha Bojja·Joe Boyd·Matthew Breitbach·Claudio Caldato·Anna Calvo·Garret Catron·Sneh Chandwani·Panos Christeas·Brad Cottel·Brian Coutinho·Arun Dalli·Abhishek Dhanotia·Oniel Duncan·Roman Dzhabarov·Simon Elmir·Chunli Fu·Wenyin Fu·Michael Fulthorp·Adi Gangidi·Nick Gibson·Sean Gordon·Beatriz Padilla Hernandez·Daniel Ho·Yu-Cheng Huang·Olof Johansson·Shishir Juluri·Shobhit Kanaujia·Manali Kesarkar·Jonathan Killinger·Ben Kim·Rohan Kulkarni·Meghan Lele·Huayu Li·Huamin Li·Yueming Li·Cynthia Liu·Jerry Liu·Bert Maher·Chandra Mallipedi·Seema Mangla·Kiran Kumar Matam·Jubin Mehta·Shobhit Mehta·Christopher Mitchell·Bharath Muthiah·Nitin Nagarkatte·Ashwin Narasimha·Bernard Nguyen·Thiara Ortiz·Soumya Padmanabha·Deng Pan·Ashwin Poojary·Ye·Qi·Olivier Raginel·Dwarak Rajagopal·Tristan Rice·Craig Ross·Nadav Rotem·Scott Russ·Kushal Shah·Baohua Shan·Hao Shen·Pavan Shetty·Krish Skandakumaran·Kutta Srinivasan·Roshan Sumbaly·Michael Tauberg·Mor Tzur·Sidharth Verma·Hao Wang
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Abstract

In this paper, we provide a deep dive into the deployment of inference accelerators at Facebook. Many of our ML workloads have unique characteristics, such as sparse memory accesses, large model sizes, as well as high compute, memory and network bandwidth requirements. We co-designed a high-performance, energy-efficient inference accelerator platform based on these requirements. We describe the inference accelerator platform ecosystem we developed and deployed at Facebook: both hardware, through Open Compute Platform (OCP), and software framework and tooling, through Pytorch/Caffe2/Glow. A characteristic of this ecosystem from the start is its openness to enable a variety of AI accelerators from different vendors. This platform, with six low-power accelerator cards alongside a single-socket host CPU, allows us to serve models of high complexity that cannot be easily or efficiently run on CPUs. We describe various performance optimizations, at both platform and accelerator level, which enables this platform to serve production traffic at Facebook. We also share deployment challenges, lessons learned during performance optimization, as well as provide guidance for future inference hardware co-design.

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Michael Anderson, Benny Chen, Stephen Chen, Summer Deng, Jordan Fix, Michael Gschwind, Aravind Kalaiah, Changkyu Kim, Jaewon Lee, Jason Liang, Haixin Liu, Yinghai Lu, Jack Montgomery, Arun Moorthy, Satish Nadathur, Sam Naghshineh, Avinash Nayak, Jongsoo Park, Chris Petersen, Martin Schatz, Narayanan Sundaram, Bangsheng Tang, Peter Tang, Amy Yang, Jiecao Yu, Hector Yuen, Ying Zhang, Aravind Anbudurai, Vandana Balan, Harsha Bojja, Joe Boyd, Matthew Breitbach, Claudio Caldato, Anna Calvo, Garret Catron, Sneh Chandwani, Panos Christeas, Brad Cottel, Brian Coutinho, Arun Dalli, Abhishek Dhanotia, Oniel Duncan, Roman Dzhabarov, Simon Elmir, Chunli Fu, Wenyin Fu, Michael Fulthorp, Adi Gangidi, Nick Gibson, Sean Gordon, Beatriz Padilla Hernandez, Daniel Ho, Yu-Cheng Huang, Olof Johansson, Shishir Juluri, Shobhit Kanaujia, Manali Kesarkar, Jonathan Killinger, Ben Kim, Rohan Kulkarni, Meghan Lele, Huayu Li, Huamin Li, Yueming Li, Cynthia Liu, Jerry Liu, Bert Maher, Chandra Mallipedi, Seema Mangla, Kiran Kumar Matam, Jubin Mehta, Shobhit Mehta, Christopher Mitchell, Bharath Muthiah, Nitin Nagarkatte, Ashwin Narasimha, Bernard Nguyen, Thiara Ortiz, Soumya Padmanabha, Deng Pan, Ashwin Poojary, Ye, Qi, Olivier Raginel, Dwarak Rajagopal, Tristan Rice, Craig Ross, Nadav Rotem, Scott Russ, Kushal Shah, Baohua Shan, Hao Shen, Pavan Shetty, Krish Skandakumaran, Kutta Srinivasan, Roshan Sumbaly, Michael Tauberg, Mor Tzur, Sidharth Verma, Hao Wang. 2021-08-04. First-Generation Inference Accelerator Deployment at Facebook. https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.04140

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