Introduction¶

Developers working to craft solutions with Artificial Intelligence face a steep learning curve in taking their concepts from design to production. It can be challenging to create a Deep Learning model that maintains a minimum standard of consistency, as it must be continually tweaked, adapted, or rewritten to use and optimize various parts of the stack during its life cycle. For DL models that do reach production-ready status, an entirely new set of problems emerges in how to scale and use larger and larger datasets, data that must be encrypted, data-in-motion, and of course, in finding the best compromises among speed, accuracy, and performance.

Two general approaches to advancing deep learning performance dominate the industry today. The first is to design hardware dedicated exclusively to handling compute for specialized kinds of Machine Learning or DL operations; this approach essentially designs a custom network infrastructure around specific problems AI is supposed to solve. For example, many companies are actively developing specialized Application-Specific Integrated Circuits to speed-up training (one kind of ASIC) or to reduce inference latency (another kind of ASIC) in their cloud-based or local data centers. This approach works great for Cloud Service Providers and others that have considerable budgets to invest in researching and building new hardware; however, it creates a significant burden on the developer who needs to invest in adapting the context of their model for training and then for inference, to figure out at least two data-cycle pipelines or deployment scenarios, and to decide what trade-offs to make when and where.

The second approach to making deep learning more efficient is to design a software stack that lets the Neural Network adapt to whatever compute resources are available and deliver performance via software optimization. The nGraph Compiler stack is our solution to this second approach: it provides an inherently efficient graph-based compilation infrastructure designed to be compatible with many upcoming DL ASICs while also unlocking a massive performance boost on any existing hardware targets in a network, whether they are CPUs, GPUs, or other custom silicon. nGraph provides optimization opportunities at the graph level, where the network-to-device compilation can be managed with a series of “subgraphs” that can be handled in either a static or a dynamic manner. With our List of Core ops and graph-based infrastructure for neural networks, it’s also possible to extract context semantics that make it much easier to work with many of the new and emerging problems in Deep Learning including larger datasets, data that must be encrypted, and data-in-motion. Our solution also addresses the scalability issue with kernel libraries, the current popular solution to accelerating deep learning performance.

Motivations¶

The current state-of-the-art software solution for speeding up deep learning computation is to integrate kernel libraries like Intel® Math Kernel Library for Deep Neural Networks (Intel® MKL DNN) and Nvidia*’s CuDNN into deep learning frameworks. These kernel libraries offer a runtime performance boost on specific hardware targets through highly-optimized kernels and other operator-level optimizations.

However, kernel libraries have three main problems:

1. Kernel libraries do not support graph-level optimizations.
2. Framework integration of kernel libraries does not scale.
3. There are too many kernels to write, and they require expert knowledge.

The nGraph Compiler stack is designed to address the first two problems. nGraph applies graph-level optimizations by taking the computational graph from a deep learning framework like TensorFlow* and reconstructing it with the nGraph Intermediate Representation. The nGraph IR centralizes computational graphs from various frameworks and provides a unified way to connect backends for targeted hardware. From here, PlaidML or one of the nGraph transformers can generate code in various forms, including LLVM, OpenCL, OpenGL, Cuda and Metal. This generated code is where the low-level optimizations are automatically applied. The result is a more efficient execution that does not require any manual kernel integration work for most hardware targets.

What follows here is more detail about how our solution addresses these problems.

Problem: Absence of graph-level optimizations¶

The diagram below illustrates a simple example of how a deep learning framework, when integrated with a kernel library, is capable of running each operation in a computational graph optimally, but the graph itself may not be optimal:

The computation is constructed to execute (A+B)*C, but in the context of nGraph, we can further optimize the graph to be represented as A*C. From the first graph shown on the left, the operation on the constant B can be computed at the compile time (known as constant folding), and the graph can be further simplified to the one on the right because the constant has value of zero. Without such graph-level optimizations, a deep learning framework with a kernel library will compute all operations, and the resulting execution will be suboptimal.

Problem: Reduced scalability¶

Integrating kernel libraries with frameworks is increasingly becoming nontrivial due to the growing number of new deep learning accelerators. For each new deep learning accelerator, a custom kernel library integration must be implemented by a team of experts. This labor-intensive work is further amplified if you want your DL accelerator to support a number of different frameworks. The work must be revisited any time you upgrade or expand your network’s hardware. Each integration is unique to the framework and its set of deep learning operators, its view on memory layout, its feature set, etc.

nGraph solves this problem with nGraph bridges. A bridge takes a computational graph and reconstructs it in the nGraph IR with a few primitive nGraph operations. With the unified computational graph, kernel libraries no longer need to be separately integrated to each deep learning framework. Instead, the libraries only need to support nGraph primitive operations, and this approach streamlines integration process for the backend.

Problem: Increasing number of kernels¶

Kernel libraries need to be integrated with multiple deep learning frameworks, and this arduous task becomes even harder due to increased numbers of required kernels for achieving optimal performance. The number of required kernels is product of number of chip designs, data types, operations, and the cardinality of each parameter for each operation. In the past, the number of required kernels was limited, but as the AI research and industry rapidly develops, the final product of required kernels is increasing exponentially.

PlaidML addresses the kernel explosion problem in a manner that lifts a heavy burden off kernel developers. It automatically lowers networks from nGraph into Tile, a :abbr:Domain-Specific Language (DSL) designed for deep learning that allows developers to express how an operation should calculate tensors in an intuitive, mathematical form via Stripe. Integration of PlaidML with nGraph means extra flexibility to support newer deep learning models in the absence of by-hand optimized kernels for the new operations.

Solution: nGraph and PlaidML¶

Each of the problems above can be solved with nGraph and PlaidML. We developed nGraph and integrated it with PlaidML so developers wanting to craft solutions with AI won’t have to face such a steep learning curve in taking their concepts from design to production, and to scale. The fundamental efficiencies behind Moore’s Law are not dead; rather than fitting more transistors on denser and denser circuits, with nGraph and PlaidML, we’re enabling advances in compute with more transformers on denser and more data-heavy Deep Learning Networks, and making it easier to apply Machine Learning to different industries and problems.

For developers with a neural network already in place, executing workloads using the nGraph Compiler provides further performance benefits and allows for quicker adaptation of models. It also makes it much easier to upgrade hardware infrastructure pieces as workloads grow.

This documentation provides technical details of nGraph’s core functionality, framework and backend integrations. Creating a compiler stack like nGraph and PlaidML requires expert knowledge, and we’re confident that nGraph and PlaidML will make life easier for many kinds of developers:

1. Framework owners looking to support new hardware and custom chips.
2. Data scientists and ML developers wishing to accelerate deep learning performance.
3. New DL accelerator developers creating an end-to-end software stack from a deep learning framework to their silicon.