Dissecting Convolutional Neural Networks for Runtime and Scalability Prediction

Given the computational complexity of deep neural networks (DNN), accurate prediction of their training and inference time using performance modeling is crucial for efficient infrastructure planning and DNN development. However, existing methods often predict only the inference time and rely on exhaustive benchmarking and fine tuning, making them time consuming and restricted in scope. As a remedy, we propose ConvMeter, a novel yet simple performance model that considers the inherent characteristics of DNNs, such as architecture, dataset, and target hardware, which strongly affect their runtime and scalability. Our performance model, which has been thoroughly tested on convolutional neural networks (ConvNets), a class of DNNs widely used for image analysis, offers the prediction of inference and training time, the latter on one or more compute nodes. Experiments with various ConvNets demonstrate that our runtime predictions of inference and training phases achieved an average error rate of less than 20% and 18%, respectively, making the assessment of ConvNets regarding efficiency and scalability straightforward.