Characterizing Deep-Learning I/O Workloads in TensorFlow

• The performance of Deep-Learning (DL) computing frameworks rely on the rformance of data ingestion and checkpointing. In fact, during the aining, a considerable high number of relatively small files are first aded and pre-processed on CPUs and then moved to accelerator for mputation. In addition, checkpointing and restart operations are rried out to allow DL computing frameworks to restart quickly from a eckpoint. Because of this, I/O affects the performance of DL plications. this work, we characterize the I/O performance and scaling of nsorFlow, an open-source programming framework developed by Google and ecifically designed for solving DL problems. To measure TensorFlow I/O rformance, we first design a micro-benchmark to measure TensorFlow ads, and then use a TensorFlow mini-application based on AlexNet to asure the performance cost of I/O and checkpointing in TensorFlow. To prove the checkpointing performance, we design and implement a burst ffer. find that increasing the number of threads increases TensorFlow ndwidth by a maximum of 2.3 x and 7.8 x on our benchmark environments. e use of the tensorFlow prefetcher results in a complete overlap of mputation on accelerator and input pipeline on CPU eliminating the fective cost of I/O on the overall performance. The use of a burst ffer to checkpoint to a fast small capacity storage and copy ynchronously the checkpoints to a slower large capacity storage sulted in a performance improvement of 2.6x with respect to eckpointing directly to slower storage on our benchmark environment.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datorteknik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Engineering (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Parallel I/O

Input Pipeline

Deep Learning

TensorFlow

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)