Optimizing AI and Deep Learning Performance

As AI and deep learning uses skyrocket, organizations are finding they are running these systems on similar resource as they do with high-performance computing (HPC) systems – and wondering if this is the path to peak efficiency. Ostensibly AI and HPC architectures have a lot in common, as AI has evolved into even more data-intensive machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) domains (Figure 1). Workloads often require multiple GPU systems as a cluster, and share those systems in a coordinated way among multiple data scientists. Secondly, both AI and HPC workloads require shared access to data at a high level of performance and communicate over a fast RDMA-enabled network. Especially in scientific research, the classic HPC systems nowadays tend to have GPUs added to the compute nodes to have the same cluster suitable for classic HPC and new AI/DL workloads.