workload
A faster way to estimate AI power consumption
Due to the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, it is estimated that data centers will consume up to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity by 2028, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Improving data center energy efficiency is one way scientists are striving to make AI more sustainable. Toward that goal, researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab developed a rapid prediction tool that tells data center operators how much power will be consumed by running a particular AI workload on a certain processor or AI accelerator chip. Their method produces reliable power estimates in a few seconds, unlike traditional modeling techniques that can take hours or even days to yield results. Moreover, their prediction tool can be applied to a wide range of hardware configurations -- even emerging designs that haven't been deployed yet.
Joint Energy Management and Coordinated AIGC Workload Scheduling for Distributed Data Centers: A Diffusion-Aided Reward Shaping Approach
Fu, Yang, Qin, Peng, Chen, Liming, Zhang, Zihao, Yu, Hao, Wang, Yifei
Artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for automating the creation of diverse and customized content, giving rise to rapidly growing computational workloads in cloud data centers. It is imperative for AIGC service providers (ASPs) to strategically schedule AIGC workloads to reduce data center energy costs while guaranteeing high-quality content generation. However, the distinctive characteristics of AIGC services pose critical challenges, including model heterogeneity across ASPs, implicit service quality evaluation, and complex inference process control. To tackle these challenges, we propose a joint energy management and coordinated AIGC workload scheduling framework, which introduces an explicit mathematical characterization of service quality to promote both job transfer among ASPs and fine-grained inference process configuration. Moreover, various energy resources within data centers are jointly considered to enhance power usage flexibility. Subsequently, a system utility maximization problem is formulated to balance AIGC service revenue with operational penalties and costs. Nevertheless, the strong coupling among job scheduling decisions induces severe reward sparsity, which limits the effectiveness of existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms. To address this issue, we develop a diffusion model-aided reward shaping approach to synthesize complementary reward signals through a multi-step denoising process. This approach is seamlessly integrated with DRL to enable efficient learning of scheduling policies under sparse environmental feedback. Experiments based on real-world models and datasets demonstrate that our scheme effectively accommodates electricity price fluctuations and AIGC model heterogeneity, while achieving superior learning convergence and system utility compared with benchmark methods.
Toward Efficient Inference for Mixture of Experts
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have recently gained steam in achieving the state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of tasks in computer vision and natural language processing. They effectively expand the model capacity while incurring a minimal increase in computation cost during training. However, deploying such models for inference is difficult due to their large model size and complex communication pattern. In this work, we provide a characterization of two MoE workloads, namely Language Modeling (LM) and Machine Translation (MT) and identify their sources of inefficiencies at deployment. We propose three optimization techniques to mitigate sources of inefficiencies, namely (1) Dynamic gating, (2) Expert Buffering, and (3) Expert load balancing. We show that dynamic gating improves maximum throughput by 6.21-11.55$\times$
Learning to Optimize Tensor Programs
We introduce a learning-based framework to optimize tensor programs for deep learning workloads. Efficient implementations of tensor operators, such as matrix multiplication and high dimensional convolution are key enablers of effective deep learning systems. However, existing systems rely on manually optimized libraries such as cuDNN where only a narrow range of server class GPUs are well-supported. The reliance on hardware specific operator libraries limits the applicability of high-level graph optimizations and incurs significant engineering costs when deploying to new hardware targets. We use learning to remove this engineering burden. We learn domain specific statistical cost models to guide the search of tensor operator implementations over billions of possible program variants. We further accelerate the search by effective model transfer across workloads. Experimental results show that our framework delivers performance competitive with state-of-the-art hand-tuned libraries for low-power CPU, mobile GPU, and server-class GPU.