Before revision: Machine learning is experiencing an explosion of software and hardware solutions, and needs industry-standard performance benchmarks to drive design and enable competitive evaluation . However, machine learning training presents a number of unique challenges to benchmarking that do not exist in other domains: (1) some optimizations that improve training throughput actually increase time to solution, (2) training is stochastic and time to solution has high variance, and (3) the software and hardware systems are so diverse that they cannot be fairly benchmarked with the same binary, code, or even hyperparameters .
After revision: Machine learning is experiencing an explosion of software and hardware solutions, and needs industry-standard performance benchmarks to support design and competitive evaluation of the many emerging software and hardware solutions for ML. But ML training presents three unique benchmarking challenges absent from other domains: (1) some optimizations that improve training throughput actually increase time to solution, (2) training is stochastic and time to solution has high variance, and (3) the software and hardware systems are so diverse that they cannot be fairly benchmarked with the same binary, code, or even hyperparameters .