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With the explosion of interest in and exploration of AI in the DOE science communities, HPC centers are preparing for a shift toward new AI-enhanced computational workflows. It is imperative that the scientific HPC community be ready to support this emerging workload with representative and robust benchmarks that allow characterization of the computational workload and drive innovation in system and software design.
MLPerf benchmarks from the MLCommons organization are the industry standard benchmark for AI performance—that is, current drivers of innovation in systems and software. NERSC co-founded the HPC working group within MLCommons, which developed the MLPerf HPC benchmark suite to address HPC and scientific AI workloads, and has continued to participate in planning and organization through the MLPerf HPC v3.0 submission round.
During this submission round, the group added the new OpenFold benchmark, a protein-folding application based on DeepMind’s famous AlphaFold2 model, and laid the groundwork for a robust power measurement methodology in coordination with the MLCommons Training group. The MLPerf HPC v3.0 results were published on November 8, 2023 and featured 30 performance results (a 50% increase over the previous year), new submitters, and impressive speed-ups over previous submission rounds (e.g., the latest DeepCAM results are 14X faster than when the benchmark debuted).
NERSC partnered with HPE to submit results to MLPerf HPC v3.0 using Perlmutter in its final configuration with upgraded Slingshot 11 network. The Perlmutter system achieved excellent results across all workloads and factors of node scaling with impressive speedups over the previous v1.0 results, including 5.3X faster results on OpenCatalyst, 2X faster results on CosmoFlow, 1.4X faster results on DeepCAM, and highly competitive results on the new OpenFold benchmark.
https://mlcommons.org/2023/11/mlperf-training-v3-1-hpc-v3-0-results/
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.
