Earlier-stage evaluations of a new AI architecture/system need affordable AI benchmarks. Only using a few AI component benchmarks like MLPerf alone in the other stages may lead to misleading conclusions. Moreover, the learning dynamics are not well understood, and the benchmarks' shelf-life is short. This paper proposes a balanced benchmarking methodology. We use real-world benchmarks to cover the factors space that impacts the learning dynamics to the most considerable extent. After performing an exhaustive survey on Internet service AI domains, we identify and implement nineteen representative AI tasks with state-of-the-art models. For repeatable performance ranking (RPR subset) and workload characterization (WC subset), we keep two subsets to a minimum for affordability. We contribute by far the most comprehensive AI training benchmark suite. The evaluations show: (1) AIBench Training (v1.1) outperforms MLPerf Training (v0.7) in terms of diversity and representativeness of model complexity, computational cost, convergent rate, computation, and memory access patterns, and hotspot functions; (2) Against the AIBench full benchmarks, its RPR subset shortens the benchmarking cost by 64%, while maintaining the primary workload characteristics; (3) The performance ranking shows the single-purpose AI accelerator like TPU with the optimized TensorFlow framework performs better than that of GPUs while losing the latter's general support for various AI models. The specification, source code, and performance numbers are available from the AIBench homepage https://www.benchcouncil.org/aibench-training/index.html.

Control-flow integrity (CFI) is a general method for preventing code-reuse attacks, which utilize benign code sequences to achieve arbitrary code execution. CFI ensures that the execution of a program follows the edges of its predefined static Control-Flow Graph: any deviation that constitutes a CFI violation terminates the application. Despite decades of research effort, there are still several implementation challenges in efficiently protecting the control flow of function returns (Return-Oriented Programming attacks). The set of valid return addresses of frequently called functions can be large and thus an attacker could bend the backward-edge CFI by modifying an indirect branch target to another within the valid return set. This article proposes RAGuard, an efficient and user-transparent hardware-based approach to prevent Return-Oreiented Programming attacks. RAGuard binds a message authentication code (MAC) to each return address to protect its integrity. To guarantee the security of the MAC and reduce runtime overhead: RAGuard (1) computes the MAC by encrypting the signature of a return address with AES-128, (2) develops a key management module based on a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) and a True Random Number Generator (TRNG), and (3) uses a dedicated register to reduce MACs’ load and store operations of leaf functions. We have evaluated our mechanism based on the open-source LEON3 processor and the results show that RAGuard incurs acceptable performance overhead and occupies reasonable area.

The complexity and diversity of big data and AI workloads make understanding them difficult and challenging. This paper proposes a new approachto modelling and characterizing big data and AI workloads. We consider each big data and AI workload as a pipeline of one or more classes of units of computation performed on different initial or intermediate data inputs. Each class of unit of computation captures the common requirements while being reasonably divorced from individual implementations, and hence we call it a data motif. For the first time, among a wide variety of big data and AI workloads, we identify eight data motifs that take up most of the run time of those workloads, including Matrix, Sampling, Logic, Transform, Set, Graph, Sort and Statistic. We implement the eight data motifs on different software stacks as the micro benchmarks of an open-source big data and AI benchmark suite --- BigDataBench 4.0 (publicly available from http://prof.ict.ac.cn/BigDataBench), and perform comprehensive characterization of those data motifs from perspective of data sizes, types, sources, and patterns as a lens towards fully understanding big data and AI workloads. We believe the eight data motifs are promising abstractions and tools for not only big data and AI benchmarking, but also domain-specific hardware and software co-design.

Rapid growth of datacenter (DC) scale, urgency of cost control, increasing workload diversity, and huge software investment protection place unprecedented demands on the operating system (OS) efficiency, scalability, performance isolation, and backward-compatibility. The traditional OSes are not built to work with deep-hierarchy software stacks, large numbers of cores, tail latency guarantee, and increasingly rich variety of applications seen in modern DCs, and thus they struggle to meet the demands of such workloads. This paper presents XOS, an application-defined OS for modern DC servers. Our design moves resource management out of the OS kernel, supports customizable kernel subsystems in user space, and enables elastic partitioning of hardware resources. Specifically, XOS leverages modern hardware support for virtualization to move resource management functionality out of the conventional kernel and into user space, which lets applications achieve near bare-metal performance. We implement XOS on top of Linux to provide backward compatibility. XOS speeds up a set of DC workloads by up to 1.6× over our baseline Linux on a 24-core server, and outperforms the state-of-the-art Dune by up to 3.3× in terms of virtual memory management. In addition, XOS demonstrates good scalability and strong performance isolation.

As architecture, systems, and data management communities pay greater attention to innovative big data systems and architecture, the pressure of benchmarking and evaluating these systems rises. However, the complexity, diversity, frequently changed workloads, and rapid evolution of big data systems raise great challenges in big data benchmarking. Considering the broad use of big data systems, for the sake of fairness, big data benchmarks must include diversity of data and workloads, which is the prerequisite for evaluating big data systems and architecture. Most of the state-of-the-art big data benchmarking efforts target evaluating specific types of applications or system software stacks, and hence they are not qualified for serving the purposes mentioned above. This paper presents our joint research efforts on this issue with several industrial partners. Our big data benchmark suite-BigDataBench not only covers broad application scenarios, but also includes diverse and representative data sets. Currently, we choose 19 big data benchmarks from dimensions of application scenarios, operations/ algorithms, data types, data sources, software stacks, and application types, and they are comprehensive for fairly measuring and evaluating big data systems and architecture. BigDataBench is publicly available from the project home page http://prof.ict.ac.cn/BigDataBench. Also, we comprehensively characterize 19 big data workloads included in BigDataBench with varying data inputs. On a typical state-of-practice processor, Intel Xeon E5645, we have the following observations: First, in comparison with the traditional benchmarks: including PARSEC, HPCC, and SPECCPU, big data applications have very low operation intensity, which measures the ratio of the total number of instructions divided by the total byte number of memory accesses; Second, the volume of data input has non-negligible impact on micro-architecture characteristics, which may impose challenges for simulation-based big data architecture research; Last but not least, corroborating the observations in CloudSuite and DCBench (which use smaller data inputs), we find that the numbers of L1 instruction cache (L1I) misses per 1000 instructions (in short, MPKI) of the big data applications are higher than in the traditional benchmarks; also, we find that L3 caches are effective for the big data applications, corroborating the observation in DCBench.