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Test results

Contributors banum-netapp
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A multitude of tests were run to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture.

There are six different workloads (image classification, object detection [small], object detection [large], medical imaging, speech-to-text, and natural language processing [NLP]), which you can run in three different scenarios: offline, single stream, and multistream.

Note The last scenario is implemented only for image classification and object detection.

This gives 15 possible workloads, which were all tested under three different setups:

  • Single server/local storage

  • Single server/network storage

  • Multi-server/network storage

The results are described in the following sections.

AI inference in offline scenario for AFF

In this scenario, all the data was available to the server and the time it took to process all the samples was measured. We report bandwidths in samples per second as the results of the tests. When more than one compute server was used, we report total bandwidth summed over all the servers. The results for all three use cases are shown in the figure below. For the two-server case, we report combined bandwidth from both servers.

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The results show that network storage does not negatively affect the performance—the change is minimal and for some tasks, none is found. When adding the second server, the total bandwidth either exactly doubles, or at worst, the change is less than 1%.

AI inference in a single stream scenario for AFF

This benchmark measures latency. For the multiple computational server case, we report the average latency. The results for the suite of tasks are given in the figure below. For the two-server case, we report the average latency from both servers.

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The results, again, show that the network storage is sufficient to handle the tasks. The difference between local and network storage in the one server case is minimal or none. Similarly, when two servers use the same storage, the latency on both servers stays the same or changes by a very small amount.

AI inference in multistream scenario for AFF

In this case, the result is the number of streams that the system can handle while satisfying the QoS constraint. Thus, the result is always an integer. For more than one server, we report the total number of streams summed over all the servers. Not all workloads support this scenario, but we have executed those that do. The results of our tests are summarized in the figure below. For the two-server case, we report the combined number of streams from both servers.

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The results show perfect performance of the setup—local and networking storage give the same results and adding the second server doubles the number of streams the proposed setup can handle.

Test results for EF

A multitude of tests were run to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture. There are six different workloads (image classification, object detection [small], object detection [large], medical imaging, speech-to-text, and natural language processing [NLP]), which were run in two different scenarios: offline and single stream. The results are described in the following sections.

AI inference in offline scenario for EF

In this scenario, all the data was available to the server and the time it took to process all the samples was measured. We report bandwidths in samples per second as the results of the tests. For single node runs we report average from both servers, while for two server runs we report total bandwidth summed over all the servers. The results for use cases are shown in the figure below.

Error: Missing Graphic Image

The results show that network storage does not negatively affect the performance—the change is minimal and for some tasks, none is found. When adding the second server, the total bandwidth either exactly doubles, or at worst, the change is less than 1%.

AI inference in a single stream scenario for EF

This benchmark measures latency. For all cases, we report average latency across all servers involved in the runs. The results for the suite of tasks are given.

Error: Missing Graphic Image

The results show again that the network storage is sufficient to handle the tasks. The difference between the local and network storage in the one server case is minimal or none. Similarly, when two servers use the same storage, the latency on both servers stays the same or changes by a very small amount.