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TensorFlow Benchmarks

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Re: TensorFlow Benchmarks

#11

From Google's perspective it is probably more about how TensorFlow scales out horizontally. If a researcher fires off a Borg run (or whatever they use now) and the job takes a few thousand CPUs, no problem, at least for research. They must have better optimization a for running in production, such as in place operations.

This. Even if it takes 10,000 networked cores to replace the ultimate souped-up single machine loaded with GPUs, you can go from 10,000 to 20,000.

Re: TensorFlow Benchmarks

#12
I don't know how much this matters, but an issue similar to this had been raised here: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/120

The responses seem to show that the way you implement things can make a big difference in runtime. Perhaps the scripts used for benchmarking can be further optimized?

That said, the lack of in-place operations might be surprising (although it has been said that they are coming)

Re: TensorFlow Benchmarks

#13
Until now, I've seen two responses to Google's TensorFlow from Facebook employees. Yann Le Cunn seemed to really challenge Jeff Dean about TensorFlow's scalability [1] and this benchmark puts TensorFlow down there in all the measures it tested for. I can't ignore the possibility that this criticism of TensorFlow from Facebook employees (while factually correct and constructive) might be driven by some competition and jealousy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90-S1M7Ny_o&t=39m

Re: TensorFlow Benchmarks

#14

From Google's perspective it is probably more about how TensorFlow scales out horizontally. If a researcher fires off a Borg run (or whatever they use now) and the job takes a few thousand CPUs, no problem, at least for research. They must have better optimization a for running in production, such as in place operations.

I wonder if this is the reason I can't get a preemptible VM from GCE to stay up for more than one hour in the last days.

Re: TensorFlow Benchmarks

#15

From Google's perspective it is probably more about how TensorFlow scales out horizontally. If a researcher fires off a Borg run (or whatever they use now) and the job takes a few thousand CPUs, no problem, at least for research. They must have better optimization a for running in production, such as in place operations.

Which would be great, except for the fact that Google has not open-sourced the distributed version of TensorFlow. So this is just PR/speculation.

Re: TensorFlow Benchmarks

#16

From Google's perspective it is probably more about how TensorFlow scales out horizontally. If a researcher fires off a Borg run (or whatever they use now) and the job takes a few thousand CPUs, no problem, at least for research. They must have better optimization a for running in production, such as in place operations.

So how horizontally scalable is it?

Re: TensorFlow Benchmarks

#18
post #4

Interesting benchmarks. One hopefully constructive critique, if you say things go out of memory, it'd be really useful to know what your setup is. Maybe you've got a big array of massive GPUs or you're running it on a more normal consumer GPU+box.

According to: https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks, it's an NVIDIA TitanX (12GB GPU memory), which is pretty much the top of the line GPU for training neural nets. From my limited experience, most deep learning in research - including much of the state of the art - is done on single GPUs. (My guess is that if your model doesn't fit in 12GB, your model has way too many parameters to practically train anyway).

Re: TensorFlow Benchmarks

#19
post #4

Interesting benchmarks. One hopefully constructive critique, if you say things go out of memory, it'd be really useful to know what your setup is. Maybe you've got a big array of massive GPUs or you're running it on a more normal consumer GPU+box.

According to: https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks , it's an NVIDIA TitanX (12GB GPU memory), which is pretty much the top of the line GPU for training neural nets. From my limited experience, most deep learning in research - including much of the state of the art - is done on single GPUs. (My guess is that if your model doesn't fit in 12GB, your model has way too many parameters to practically train anyway)…

Ah thank you for that, I hadn't clocked on that this was opened by the person who ran the repo. I should have checked the main readme.

Re: TensorFlow Benchmarks

#20

Until now, I've seen two responses to Google's TensorFlow from Facebook employees. Yann Le Cunn seemed to really challenge Jeff Dean about TensorFlow's scalability [1] and this benchmark puts TensorFlow down there in all the measures it tested for. I can't ignore the possibility that this criticism of TensorFlow from Facebook employees (while factually correct and constructive) might be driven by some competition and…

I think I'll give the benefit of the doubt to, you know, the pioneer of deep learning, inventor of convolutional neural networks, and (co)-inventor of the backpropagation algorithm.
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