AI Gets New Benchmark

Google, Baidu spearhead MLPerf

Rick Merritt, EETimes
5/2/2018 11:55 AM EDT

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Google and Baidu collaborated with researchers at Harvard and Stanford to define a suite of benchmarks for machine learning. So far, AMD, Intel, two AI startups, and two other universities have expressed support for MLPerf, an initial version of which will be ready for use in August.

Today’s hardware falls far short of running neural-networking jobs at the performance levels desired. A flood of new accelerators are coming to market, but the industry lacks ways to measure them.

To fill the gap, the first release of MLPerf will focus on training jobs on a range of systems from workstations to large data centers, a big pain point for web giants such as Baidu and Google. Later releases will expand to include inference jobs, eventually extended to include ones run on embedded client systems.

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