Sirius: An open end-to-end voice and vision personal assistant and its implications for future warehouse scale computers

Johann Hauswald, Michael A. Laurenzano, Yunqi Zhang, Cheng Li, Austin Rovinski, Arjun Khurana, Ronald G. Dreslinski, Trevor Mudge, Vinicius Petrucci, Lingjia Tang, Jason Mars

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

As user demand scales for intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) such as Apple's Siri, Google's Google Now, and Microsoft's Cortana, we are approaching the computational limits of current datacenter architectures. It is an open question how future server architectures should evolve to enable this emerging class of applications, and the lack of an open-source IPA workload is an obstacle in addressing this question. In this paper, we present the design of Sirius, an open end-to-end IPA web-service application that accepts queries in the form of voice and images, and responds with natural language. We then use this workload to investigate the implications of four points in the design space of future accelerator-based server architectures spanning traditional CPUs, GPUs, manycore throughput co-processors, and FP-GAs. To investigate future server designs for Sirius, we decompose Sirius into a suite of 7 benchmarks (Sirius Suite) comprising the computationally intensive bottlenecks of Sirius. We port Sirius Suite to a spectrum of accelerator platforms and use the performance and power trade-offs across these platforms to perform a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis of various server design points. In our study, we find that accelerators are critical for the future scalability of IPA services. Our results show that GPU- and FPGA-accelerated servers improve the query latency on average by 10 × and 16 ×. For a given throughput, GPU- and FPGA-accelerated servers can reduce the TCO of datacenters by 2.6 × and 1.4 ×, respectively.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationASPLOS 2015 - 20th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages223-238
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9781450328357
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 14 2015
Event20th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2015 - Istanbul, Turkey
Duration: Mar 14 2015Mar 18 2015

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems - ASPLOS
Volume2015-January

Conference

Conference20th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2015
Country/TerritoryTurkey
CityIstanbul
Period3/14/153/18/15

Keywords

  • Datacenters
  • Emerging workloads
  • Intelligent personal assistants
  • Warehouse scale computers

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Information Systems
  • Hardware and Architecture

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