Performance

Performance is mainly affected by the following 4 factors:

1. Implementation of operators (Convolution, Pooling, ..)
   • Intel CPU
   • Nvidia GPU
2. Input data loading and augmentation
   • Input Data
3. Workloads (computation graph) optimization and scheduling
   • Profiler
4. Communication for multi-devices training
   • Multiple Devices

Intel CPU

For using Intel Xeon CPUs for training and inference, we suggest to enable both USE_MKL2017 = 1 and USE_MKL2017_EXPERIMENTAL = 1 in config.mk. Check MKL_README.md for details

Also setting the following two environment variables may help:

• export KMP_AFFINITY=granularity=fine,compact,1,0 if there are two physical CPUs
• export OMP_NUM_THREADS=vCPUs / 2 in which vCPUs is the number of virtual CPUs. For linux we can get it by cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l

Note that MXNet treats all CPU in a single machine as a single device. So when specify cpu(0) or cpu(), all CPU cores in the machine will be used.

Scoring results

The following table shows the scoring performance, namely number of images can be predicted per second. We used AWS EC2 C4.8xlarge (dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2666 v3 @ 2.90GHz) and example/image-classification/benchmark_score.py with MXNet commit 0a03417

Batch	Alexnet	VGG	Inception-BN	Inception-v3	Resnet 50	Resnet 152
1	122.21	34.23	99.24	52.16	46.03	20.11
2	224.83	51.02	138.88	66.76	52.27	24.82
4	295.87	65.88	185.46	76.70	67.45	28.16
8	389.08	77.78	212.96	84.00	69.26	29.70
16	519.87	85.08	222.81	85.10	68.94	29.11
32	626.25	87.63	221.66	84.36	67.69	28.70

Other CPU

If using CPUs (not just Intel CPUs -- ARMs also), NNPACK will also improve the running performance with 2x~7x, please check nnpack.md for details.

Nvidia GPU

cuDNN often greatly accelerate performance on Nvidia GPUs, especially for convolution layers. Please check a recent CUDNN version is used.

Setting the environment export MXNET_CUDNN_AUTOTUNE_DEFAULT=1 sometimes also helps.

We show performance results of various GPUs including K80 (EC2 p2.2xlarge), M40, and P100 (DGX-1).

Scoring results

Based on example/image-classification/benchmark_score.py and MXNet commit 0a03417, with CUDNN 5.1

• K80 (single GPU)

  Batch	Alexnet	VGG	Inception-BN	Inception-v3	Resnet 50	Resnet 152
  1	202.66	70.76	74.91	42.61	70.94	24.87
  2	233.76	63.53	119.60	60.09	92.28	34.23
  4	367.91	78.16	164.41	72.30	116.68	44.76
  8	624.14	119.06	195.24	79.62	129.37	50.96
  16	1071.19	195.83	256.06	99.38	160.40	66.51
  32	1443.90	228.96	287.93	106.43	167.12	69.73

• M40

  Batch	Alexnet	VGG	Inception-BN	Inception-v3	Resnet 50	Resnet 152
  1	412.09	142.10	115.89	64.40	126.90	46.15
  2	743.49	212.21	205.31	108.06	202.17	75.05
  4	1155.43	280.92	335.69	161.59	266.53	106.83
  8	1606.87	332.76	491.12	224.22	317.20	128.67
  16	2070.97	400.10	618.25	251.87	335.62	134.60
  32	2694.91	466.95	624.27	258.59	373.35	152.71

• P100

  Batch	Alexnet	VGG	Inception-BN	Inception-v3	Resnet 50	Resnet 152
  1	624.84	294.6	139.82	80.17	162.27	58.99
  2	1226.85	282.3	267.41	142.63	278.02	102.95
  4	1934.97	399.3	463.38	225.56	423.63	168.91
  8	2900.54	522.9	709.30	319.52	529.34	210.10
  16	4063.70	755.3	949.22	444.65	647.43	270.07
  32	4883.77	854.4	1197.74	493.72	713.17	294.17

Training results

Based on example/image-classification/train_imagenet.py and MXNet commit 0a03417, with CUDNN 5.1. The benchmark script is available at here, where the batch size for Alexnet is increased by 8x.

• K80 (single GPU)

  Batch	Alexnet(*8)	Inception-v3	Resnet 50
  1	230.69	9.81	13.83
  2	348.10	15.31	21.85
  4	457.28	20.48	29.58
  8	533.51	24.47	36.83
  16	582.36	28.46	43.60
  32	483.37	29.62	45.52

• M40

  Batch	Alexnet(*8)	Inception-v3	Resnet 50
  1	405.17	14.35	21.56
  2	606.32	23.96	36.48
  4	792.66	37.38	52.96
  8	1016.51	52.69	70.21
  16	1105.18	62.35	83.13
  32	1046.23	68.87	90.74

• P100

  Batch	Alexnet(*8)	Inception-v3	Resnet 50
  1	809.94	15.14	27.20
  2	1202.93	30.34	49.55
  4	1631.37	50.59	78.31
  8	1882.74	77.75	122.45
  16	2012.04	111.11	156.79
  32	1869.69	129.98	181.53

Multiple Devices

If more than one GPU or machine are used, MXNet uses kvstore to communicate data. A proper type of kvstore is critical to get the best performance. We can refer to mutli_device.md for more details.

Besides, we can use tools/bandwidth to find the communication cost per batch. An ideal situation is the cost is less than the time to compute a batch. We can

• Explore different --kv-store options to reduce the cost
• Increase the batch size to improve the computation and communication ratio.

Input Data

For the input data, mind the following:

• Data format. If you are using the rec format, then everything should be fine.
• Decoding. By default, MXNet uses 4 CPU threads for decoding images. This is often sufficient to decode more than 1K images per second. If you are using a low-end CPU or your GPUs are very powerful, you can increase the number of threads.
• Storage location. Any local or distributed file system (HDFS, Amazon S3) should be fine. If multiple devices read the data from the network shared file system (NFS) at the same time, problems might occur.
• Use a large batch size. We often choose the largest one that fits into GPU memory. A value that's too large can slow down convergence. For example, the safe batch size for CIFAR 10 is approximately 200, while for ImageNet 1K, the batch size can exceed 1K.

Profiler

As of v0.9.1 (with the NNVM merge) MXNet has a built-in profiler that gives detailed information about execution time at the symbol level. This feature compliments general profiling tools like nvprof and gprof by summarizing at the operator level, instead of a function, kernel, or instruction level.

To be able to use the profiler, you must compile MXNet with the USE_PROFILER=1 flag in config.mk. Once enabled, the profiler can be enabled with an environment variable for an entire program run, or programmatically for just part of a run. See example/profiler for complete examples of how to use the profiler in code, but briefly, the python code looks like

    mx.profiler.profiler_set_config(mode='all', filename='profile_output.json')
    mx.profiler.profiler_set_state('run')

    # Code to be profiled goes here...

    mx.profiler.profiler_set_state('stop')

The mode parameter can be set to

• symbolic to only include symbolic operations
• all to include all operations

After program finishes, navigate to chrome://tracing in a Chrome browser and load profiler output .json file to see the results.

Note that the output file can quickly grow to become extremely large, so it is not recommended for general use.