As large language models (LLMs) become widespread in various application domains, a critical challenge the AI community is facing is how to train these large AI models in a cost-effective manner. Existing LLM training plans typically employ a heuristic based parallel training strategy which is based on empirical observations rather than grounded upon a thorough examination of the search space of LLM parallelization. Such limitation renders existing systems to leave significant performance left on the table, wasting millions of dollars worth of training cost. This paper presents our profiling-driven simulator called vTrain, providing AI practitioners a fast yet accurate software framework to determine an efficient and cost-effective LLM training system configuration. We demonstrate vTrain's practicality through several case studies, e.g., effectively evaluating optimal training parallelization strategies that balances training time and its associated training cost, efficient multi-tenant GPU cluster schedulers targeting multiple LLM training jobs, and determining a compute-optimal LLM model architecture given a fixed compute budget.

As semiconductor devices become miniaturized and their structures become more complex, there is a growing need for large-scale atomic-level simulations as a less costly alternative to the trial-and-error approach during development.Although machine learning force fields (MLFFs) can meet the accuracy and scale requirements for such simulations, there are no open-access benchmarks for semiconductor materials.Hence, this study presents a comprehensive benchmark suite that consists of two semiconductor material datasets and ten MLFF models with six evaluation metrics. We select two important semiconductor thin-film materials silicon nitride and hafnium oxide, and generate their datasets using computationally expensive density functional theory simulations under various scenarios at a cost of 2.6k GPU days.Additionally, we provide a variety of architectures as baselines: descriptor-based fully connected neural networks and graph neural networks with rotational invariant or equivariant features.We assess not only the accuracy of energy and force predictions but also five additional simulation indicators to determine the practical applicability of MLFF models in molecular dynamics simulations.To facilitate further research, our benchmark suite is available at https://github.com/SAITPublic/MLFF-Framework.

An efficient multi-hypothesis error concealment algorithm for H.264 video is proposed in this work. The proposed algorithm temporally conceals a lost block by combining several hypothesis blocks in the previous frame. We investigate the error recovery performance according to the number of hypotheses and the weighting coefficients. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides better performance than the conventional error concealment algorithm, although the additional complexity requirement is negligible.