Repository to track Dl4j benchmarks in relation to well known frameworks on cpu and gpu and for dl4j on spark.

• ModelCompare: compares same structure across all frameworks in this repo
  • MLP: using simple, single layer feed forward with MNIST data
  • Lenet: using common LeNet CNN model with MNIST data
• Cifar10: compares Dl4j against best structures from each framework
• Experiment: explores other comparisons and more of storage for drafts and works in progress

The deeplearning4j-spark-benchmark package contains a number of synthetic benchmarks to test Spark training performance under a variety of situations.

For more details, see the readme [here - TODO]

Main packages included for comparison so far...

Dl4j (v0.6.0)

• Install: http://deeplearning4j.org/quickstart
• Setup packages: add to pom.xml
• Set GPU: change in pom file under nd4j-backends (native for cpu and cuda-7.5 for gpu)
• Compile: mvn clean install -P (native or cuda)

Caffe (vr3)

• Install: http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/installation.html
• Set GPU: change in solver prototext under solver_mode as either CPU or GPU
• Pass in -gpu # for the number of GPUs to use or all for all

Tensorflow(v0.9.0)

• Install: https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.9/get_started/os_setup.html
• Setup packages: pip install <filename>
• cuDNN required for CNN models and cuDNN > 4 requires to compile from source
• Checkout for configuration fixes: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37663064/cudnn-compile-configuration-in-tensorflow

Torch (v7)

• Install: http://torch.ch/docs/getting-started.html
• Setup packages: luarocks install <filename>
• Utilize cutorch, cunn, cudnn packages for cuda backend integration
• cuDNN required for CNN models

To run any of these examples, configure the system to the platform, install this repo and run:

    ./dl4j-core-benchmarks/scripts/model_compare_.sh

Note: If multiple GPUs, control how many used by adding 'export CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=' to .bashrc or .bash_profile and setting empty for CPU and 0,1,2,3 for GPUs (0 if just one and 0,1 if just two)

Running benchmarks on following system setup:

• Ubuntu 14.0.4
• 60GB RAM
• 32 Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs
• 4 Grid GPUs 4GB RAM
• gcc & g++ v4.9
• BLAS: OpenBLAS v1.13 or Cublas v7.5
• cuDNN v5.1.3

In order to run all examples in core, you need to configure a system for all of the platforms. Each platform differs in requirements and be especially aware of software versions that are not supported.

Initial analysis. Consider all numbers hostile with potential to change as we get additional reviews sorted.

MLP Example

Lenet Example w/ cuDNN

MLP Example

Lenet Example w/ cuDNN

Note:

• Tensorflow required learning rate modification on MLP by 1/10th otherwise accuracy drops to 9%

• Accuracy varies slighty between cpu, single gpu & multi-gpu (e.g. DL4J multi-gpu is .90 for mlp and .97 for lenet).
• Timings vary (potentially a couple seconds) for all packages on each run
• Time to transfer and consolidate data can lead to longer performance times on multi-gpu (larger datasets needed for comparison)
• Issues getting nccl setup on system for Torch multiple gpu tests; thus, not used

Help is welcome to improve comparisons. If you know a better way or see a fix that is needed, please submit a pull request. Top of mind next steps that help would be appreciated:

- Compare LSTMs, Autoencoders, RBMs where available
- Setup Dl4j AlexNet functionality with multiple GPUs for benchmark