Date: June 28, 2017

Authors: Sharan Narang, Greg Diamos

In September 2016, we released DeepBench, an open source benchmarking tool that measures the performance of basic operations involved in training deep learning networks. The benchmark included results on several different processors used for training. We’ve extended DeepBench to include support for deep learning inference. Inference changes include using low precision kernels, modifying the sizes of kernels and benchmarking sparse operations. In addition, the training benchmark now has support for Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) and low precision training.

Date: September 26, 2016

Authors: Sharan Narang

DeepBench is the first open source benchmarking tool for evaluation the performance of deep learning operations on different hardware platforms. DeepBench also includes a list of operations and workloads that are important to the performance of deep learning training. We’ve measured performance of matrix multiplies, convolutions, Recurrent ops (vanilla RNNs and LSTMs) and all-reduce for different sizes and parameters on Nvidia and Intel processors. We welcome contributions from the deep learning community to add to the list of existing operations and from hardware vendors who would like provide benchmark

Part II: Optimizing RNN performance

Date: June 14th, 2016

Authors: Jesse Engel

Differentiable graph notation provides an easy way to visually infer the gradients for complex neural networks. We also show several useful rules of thumb for optimizing graphs of new algorithms.

Date: March 25th, 2016

Authors: Greg Diamos

YouTube: SVAIL Tech Notes: Accelerating RNNs by Stashing Weights On-Chip

At SVAIL, our mission is to create AI technology that lets us have a significant impact on hundreds of millions of people. We believe that a good way to do this is to improve the accuracy of speech recognition by scaling up deep learning algorithms on larger datasets than what has been done in the past.

Date: February 9th, 2016

Authors: Tony Han, Ryan Prenger

YouTube: SVAIL Tech Notes: Recognizing both English and Mandarin

In our recent paper Deep Speech 2, we showed our results in Mandarin. In just a few months, we had produced a Mandarin speech recognition system with a recognition rate better than native Mandarin speakers. Here we want to discuss what we did to adapt the system to Mandarin and how the end-to-end learning approach made the whole project easier.

Date: January 14th, 2016

Contact: svail-questions@baidu.com

YouTube: SVAIL Tech Notes: Warp CTC

Warp-CTC from Baidu Research's Silicon Valley AI Lab is a fast parallel implementation of CTC, on both CPU and GPU. Warp-CTC can be used to solve supervised problems that map an input sequence to an output sequence, such as speech recognition. To get Warp-CTC follow the link above. If you are interested in integrating Warp-CTC into a machine learning framework reach out to us. We are happy to accept pull requests.

Part I: Optimizing RNN performance

Date: November 17th, 2015

Author: Erich Elsen

Most researchers engaging in Neural Network research have been using GPUs for training for some time now due to the speed advantage they have over CPUs. GPUs from NVIDIA are almost universally preferred because they come with high quality BLAS (cuBLAS) and convolution (cuDNN) libraries.