FAMBench (Family Friendly Benchmarking)

These benchmarks represent important workloads. The faster these benchmarks are, the happier owners of important workloads are. The maintainers, updates, and rules in this benchmark suite all exist to keep the connection between the people running these benchmarks and the people running the original workloads.

The key things to know:

• These benchmarks are directly connected to real workloads run every day
• The main metric is throughput, subject to some constraints such as latency or max batchsize
• Data is often synthetic, though we have safeguards to ensure correctness
• There are special requirements when improving these benchmarks - it's not "anything goes"
• This includes benchmarks (runnable on 1 device, multiple devices, clusters) and microbenchmarks

To get starting running the benchmark suite right away on a V100:

cd benchmarks
./run_all.sh

The Suite

This suite captures benchmarks across multiple devices, across multiple precisions, and includes microbenchmarks. We organize the suite so each benchmark result is identified as:

Benchmark = Models + Implementation + Mode + Configuration

Models

This suite contains the following benchmarks:

• Recommendation: DLRM
• Speech: RNN-T
• Text: XLM-R (TorchText)
• Text: OSCAR
• Text: MoE
• Vision: CVT
• Video transformers: BEVT

Implementation

Each benchmark comes in three different implementations:

• Out Of The Box (OOTB): indicates the performance that is provided by the libraries and frameworks. Code is written like a regular AI engineer / researcher would write the code, not like a systems/hardware specialist would write the code.
• Optimized: Represents the best possible performance which can be reached; the code is tuned, re-written (and perhaps even mangled) by hardware and software experts
• Microbenchmarks: benchmarks which look at a specific component of dev, computer or cluster. These are highly unique and specialized in their purpose.

Modes

For OOTB and optimized implementations, the modes are Inference and Training. For Microbenchmarks, the mode is the specific kind of microbenchmark being run.

Configurations

Each implementation comes in multiple configurations. Each configuration looks at the benchmark in a different way, such as:

• The model and data scaled to different number of devices: e.g. 1, 8, multiple node
• Different precisions and numeric formats
• Different variants of the models, representing possible different layers or sizes the model might be run at.

Results

Running one or more benchmarks on a specific machine or cluster produces a results table. Below are example results which you may get.

Model	Implementation	Mode	Config	Batch Size	Score	Units
Recommend: DLRM	OOTB	Training	A.1dev-embed32-fp32	1024	570.16	ex/s
Recommend: DLRM	OOTB	Inference	A.1dev-embed4-fp32	1024	61.85*	ex/s
Recommend: DLRM	Micro	MLP/Linear	linear_A.1dev	256	7.08	TF/s
Recommend: DLRM	Micro	EmbeddingBag	emb_A.1dev	65536	537.80	GB/s

• = missed latency target

Notice the following in this table:

• Each row is one Benchmark run with a batch size (Model + Implementation + Mode + Config at a given batch size). More on batch size in Suite Design.
• All rows in the same table are run on the same machine. Benchmarks from different hardware must appear in different result tables.
• Some results have a * denoting that they missed the latency target. More on latency targets in Suite Design.
• You may report multiple batch sizes for the same benchmark, they appear as different lines in the table.

Results by System Scale

We look at all the results to understand the broader picture of performance.

** For systems that can't run the full model: ** Microbenchmarks give us a picture into potential performance and early indicators of where to explore more.

** For single device systems: ** For training, single device configurations and microbenchmarks can indicate trends in overall cluster performance; microbenchmarks run on the cluster paired with single device results can indicate if single device performance is in fact the bottleneck. For inference, single inference is often easily parallelizable across multiple devices, the single device benchmarks are a very good indicator of real performance. This has the added advantage of being quick and easy for debugging and experiments.

** For multiple device, single node: ** For Training, multidevice configurations give good insight into how single nodes perform within a cluster - this can be combined with microbenchmarks on the cluster to predict overall performance. For inference, this is a great reflection of actual workloads. This has the added advantage of being quick and easy for debugging and experiments.

** For Clusters: ** Running these benchmarks on a cluster gives the best indication of performance for Training but does not add additional information for Inference. The downside is, obviously, these runs are more costly to set up and run.

How Results are Consumed

There are two broad comparisons that can be done: hardware-to-hardware and OOTB v. Optimized.

• System to System: Compare two tables generated by two different systems to understand their differences
• OOTB v. Optimized: Look at one table, one system, and understand the gap between the software (compilers, frameworks, and libraries) and what might be possible if the software was improved.

Generally, consuming results is specific to the situation. Different goals will result in placing different priorities and weights when evaluating results so there isn't a one size fits all approach here. It's up to the people and situation.

Suite Design

We are very specific about how these benchmarks must be run and optimized in order to maintain our goal: ** improvements to these benchmarks connect directly to improvements in important internal workloads **. Where our methodology may seem arbitrary or cumbersome, it is in service of maintaining the connection to the source.

Ownership, Versions & Updates

Each Benchmark (Model + Implementation + Mode + Config) is connected with an actual owner of an actual workload who endorsed the benchmark. The owner is the arbiter of changes, updates, and methodology for the benchmark. It is exceptionally frustrating to see benchmarks change while you are working on them. It sucks, and we version our benchmarks to help with bookkeeping. Ultimately, our goal here is to reflect the current state of what people care about - unfortunately this means (sometimes too frequently) bumping versions to ensure we are offering the best proxy to the world.

Convergence and Accuracy

The gold standard in understanding how the system works is measuring convergence and accuracy of the model in the end-to-end context. Unfortunately, as shown by MLPerf, this is exceptionally costly, burdensome and slow. We do not place an emphasis on convergence and accuracy for the following reasons:

• We don't allow significant changes to model code (see "Improving the Benchmark Score"), so we don't expect people to be breaking convergence
• We limit the data types and precisions to ones we understand and are known to be viable
• We (will) offer the ability to verify correctness (possibly through real data or through statistical analysis on synthetic data)
• We lean on benchmarks in MLPerf which has a similar suite of models and submissions to MLPerf are required to test correctness.

Overall, we aim to allow benchmarking at the granularity which is usable by people in their projects, representative of the actual workloads, and not overly cumbersome or expensive. It's a compromise.

Data

As discussed in Convergence and Accuracy, we are not an accuracy or convergence benchmark. This frees us up to use synthetic data which significantly improves usability and time-to-results for this suite.

We may choose to use real data, or data derived from real data, where we cannot generate proper synthetic data.

Batch Sizes

Generally speaking, the bigger the batch size the better the throughput but the longer the time to converge and the higher the latency. When running these benchmarks, people will want to see:

• The benchmark run at specific known batch sizes (where the convergence is understood) to allow for predicting and modeling
• The benchmark at the batch size which gives the best throughput, subject to either (a) a maximum batchsize for which the model will converge, or (b) a latency requirement for requests.

Latency Limits

Inference benchmarks come with latency limits and the goal is to provide the best QPS while hitting the latency limit. Some inference benchmarks may reflect user facing operations where latency is key. Some inference benchmarks may reflect background jobs where throughput is key - so the latency limit is very high in these cases.

Improving the Benchmark Score

The bigger the score, the better - but there are limits on how to get there. The limits depend on the implementation (Out-Of-The-Box OOTB, Optimized, or Microbenchmark).

• Out-Of-The-Box (OOTB): Improvements must come in through libraries, frameworks, and new hardware. No changing the model code (special exceptions for non-optimizing changes which enable porting to new hardware).
• Optimized: No holds barred - make the system shine. Just keep in mind everything you do, you're asking the actual people who run the workloads to do it too if they're going to realize that performance. You'll need to describe what changes you made, so keep track.
• Microbenchmarks - Implement the same operation as defined, and make it as fast as possible.

License

This is released under the APACHE 2 license. Please see the LICENSE file for more information.