In plain words: Facebook built a server with six low-power accelerator cards and one CPU, plus matching software, to run big AI models that CPUs handle poorly. The design is open to chips from different vendors and now serves live Facebook traffic.
Abstract · First-Generation Inference Accelerator Deployment at Facebook
In this paper, we provide a deep dive into the deployment of inference accelerators at Facebook. Many of our ML workloads have unique characteristics, such as sparse memory accesses, large model sizes, as well as high compute, memory and network bandwidth requirements. We co-designed a high-performance, energy-efficient inference accelerator platform based on these requirements. We describe the inference accelerator platform ecosystem we developed and deployed at Facebook: both hardware, through Open Compute Platform (OCP), and software framework and tooling, through Pytorch/Caffe2/Glow. A characteristic of this ecosystem from the start is its openness to enable a variety of AI accelerators from different vendors. This platform, with six low-power accelerator cards alongside a single-socket host CPU, allows us to serve models of high complexity that cannot be easily or efficiently run on CPUs. We describe various performance optimizations, at both platform and accelerator level, which enables this platform to serve production traffic at Facebook. We also share deployment challenges, lessons learned during performance optimization, as well as provide guidance for future inference hardware co-design.
Michael Anderson, Benny Chen, Stephen Chen, Summer Deng, Jordan Fix, Michael Gschwind, Aravind Kalaiah, Changkyu Kim, Jaewon Lee, Jason Liang, Haixin Liu, Yinghai Lu, et al.
arXiv:2107.04140 · cs.AR · submitted Jul 8, 2021 · updated Aug 4, 2021
abstract · pdf · html