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.

The prosperity of cloud computing offers common infrastructures to a wide range of applications. Understanding these applications' workload behaviors is the premise of designing, managing, and optimizing cloud systems. Considering the heterogeneity and diversity of cloud workloads, for the sake of fairness, cloud benchmarks must be able to accurately replicate their behaviors in cloud systems, including both the usages of cloud resources and the micro-architectural behaviors beyond the virtualization layer. Furthermore, workloads spanning long durations are usually required to achieve representativeness in evaluation. Hence the more challenging issue is to significantly reduce the evaluation duration while still preserving their workload characteristics. This paper presents our efforts towards generating cloud workloads of diverse behaviors and reducible durations. Our benchmark tool, CloudMix, employs a repository of reducible workload blocks (RWBs) as the high level abstraction of workload behaviors, including usages of the two most important cloud resources (CPU and memory) and their pairing micro-architectural operations. CloudMix further introduces an efficient methodology to combine RWBs to synthesize and replicate diverse cloud workloads in real-world traces. The effectiveness of CloudMix is demonstrated by generating a variety of reducible workloads according to a Google cluster trace and by applying these workloads in job scheduling optimization on Hadoop YARN. The evaluation results show: (i) when the workload durations are reduced by 100 times, the replication errors of workload behaviors are smaller than 2.08%; (ii) when providing fast evaluations (workload durations are reduced by 10 to 100 times) to recommend the optimal setting in YARN job scheduling, the performance degradation in the recommended setting is just 0.69% compared to that of the actual optimal setting. CloudMix is publicly available from the project home page http://prof.ict.ac.cn/BigDataBench/multi tenancy/.

The growing demands of processing massive datasets have promoted irresistible trends of running machine learning applications on MapReduce. When processing large input data, it is often of greater values to produce fast and accurate enough approximate results than slow exact results. Existing techniques produce approximate results by processing parts of the input data, thus incurring large accuracy losses when using short job execution times, because all the skipped input data potentially contributes to result accuracy. We address this limitation by proposing AccurateML that aggregates information of input data in each map task to create small aggregated data points. These aggregated points enable all map tasks producing initial outputs quickly to save computation times and decrease the outputs' size to reduce communication times. Our approach further identifies the parts of input data most related to result accuracy, thus first using these parts to improve the produced outputs to minimize accuracy losses. We evaluated AccurateML using real machine learning applications and datasets. The results show: (i) it reduces execution times by 30 times with small accuracy losses compared to exact results; (ii) when using the same execution times, it achieves 2.71 times reductions in accuracy losses compared to existing approximate processing techniques.

As iterative machine learning (ML) (e.g. neural network based supervised learning and k-means clustering) becomes more ubiquitous in our daily life, it is becoming increasingly important to complete model training quickly to support real-time decision making, while still achieving high model accuracy (e.g. low prediction errors) that is critical for profits of ML tasks. Motivated by the observation that the small proportions of accuracy-critical input data can contribute to large parts of model accuracy in many iterative ML applications, this paper introduces a system middleware to maximize model accuracy by spending the limited time budget on the most accuracy-related input data. To achieve this, our approach employs a fast method to divide the input data into multiple parts of similar points and represents each part with an aggregated data point. Using these points, it quickly estimates the correlations between different parts and model accuracy, thus allowing ML tasks to process the most accuracy-related parts first. We incorporate our approach with two popular supervised and unsupervised ML algorithms on Spark and demonstrate its benefits in providing high model accuracy under short deadlines.