MLPerf Benchmarks

The NVIDIA AI platform shines in both MLPerf Training and Inference, showcasing leading performance and versatility to tackle the most demanding, real-world AI workloads.

What is MLPerf?

MLPerf is a consortium of AI leaders from academia, research labs, and industry whose mission is to “build fair and useful benchmarks” that provide unbiased evaluations of training and inference performance for hardware, software, and services—all conducted under prescribed conditions. To stay on the cutting edge of industry trends, MLPerf continues to evolve, holding new tests at regular intervals and adding new workloads that represent the state of the art in AI.

Chalmers University is one of the leading research institutions in Sweden, specializing in multiple areas from nanotechnology to climate studies. As we incorporate AI to advance our research endeavors, we find that the MLPerf benchmark provides a transparent apples-to-apples comparison across multiple AI platforms to showcase actual performance in diverse real-world use cases.

— Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

TSMC is driving the cutting edge of global semiconductor manufacturing, like our latest 5nm node which leads the market in process technology. Innovations like machine learning based lithography and etch modeling dramatically improve our optical proximity correction (OPC) and etch simulation accuracy. To fully realize the potential of machine learning in model training and inference, we are working with the NVIDIA engineering team to port our Maxwell simulation and inverse lithography technology (ILT) engine to GPUs and see very significant speedups. The MLPerf benchmark is an important factor in our decision making.

— Dr. Danping Peng, Director, OPC Department, TSMC, San Jose, CA, USA

Computer vision and imaging are at the core of AI research, driving scientific discovery and readily representing core components of medical care. We've worked closely with NVIDIA to bring innovations like 3DUNet to the healthcare market. Industry-standard MLPerf benchmarks provide relevant performance data to the benefit of IT organizations and developers to get the right solution to accelerate their specific projects and applications.

— Prof. Dr. Klaus Maier-Hein (Head of Medical Image Computing, Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (DKFZ, German Cancer Research Center)

As the pre-eminent leader in research and manufacturing, Samsung uses AI to dramatically boost product performance and manufacturing productivity. Productizing these AI advances requires us to have the best computing platform available. The MLPerf benchmark streamlines our selection process by providing us with an open, direct evaluation method to assess uniformly across platforms.

— Samsung Electronics

MLPerf Submission Categories

MLPerf Training v2.0 is the sixth instantiation for training and consists of eight different workloads covering a broad diversity of use cases, including vision, language, recommenders, and reinforcement learning.

MLPerf Inference v2.0 tested seven different use cases across seven different kinds of neural networks. Three of these use cases were for computer vision, one for recommender systems, two for language processing, and one for medical imaging.

Image Classification

Image Classification

Assigns a label from a fixed set of categories to an input image, i.e., applies to computer vision problems. details.

Object Detection (Lightweight)

Object Detection (Lightweight)

Finds instances of real-world objects such as faces, bicycles, and buildings in images or videos and specifies a bounding box around each. details.

Object Detection (Heavyweight)

Object Detection (Heavyweight)

Detects distinct objects of interest appearing in an image and identifies a pixel mask for each. details.

Biomedical Image Segmentation

Biomedical Image Segmentation

Performs volumetric segmentation of dense 3D images for medical use cases. details.

Translation (Recurrent)

Translation (Recurrent)

Translates text from one language to another using a recurrent neural network (RNN). details.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)

Recognize and transcribe audio in real time. details.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Understands text by using the relationship between different words in a block of text. Allows for question answering, sentence paraphrasing, and many other language-related use cases. details.

Recommendation

Recommendation

Delivers personalized results in user-facing services such as social media or e-commerce websites by understanding interactions between users and service items, like products or ads. details.

Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning

Evaluates different possible actions to maximize reward using the strategy game Go played on a 19x19 grid. details.

NVIDIA’s MLPerf Benchmark Results

  • Training

    Training

  • Inference

    Inference

The NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU and the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD delivered leading performance across all MLPerf tests, both per chip and at scale. This breakthrough performance came from the tight integration of hardware, software, and system-level technologies. NVIDIA’s relentless investment across the entire stack has driven performance improvements with each MLPerf submission. The NVIDIA platform is unmatched in overall performance and versatility, delivering a single platform for training and inference that’s available everywhere—from the data center to the edge to the cloud.

Over 20x Performance in Three Year​s of MLPerf

NVIDIA's Full-Stack Innovation Delivers Continuous Improvements

MLPerf Training Performance Benchmarks

NVIDIA AI Delivers Leading Performance and Versatility

For Commercially Available Solutions

The NVIDIA AI platform delivered leading performance across MLPerf tests and was the only platform to submit across all benchmarks. This demonstrates the performance and versatility of the full-stack NVIDIA AI platform for all AI workloads.

BENCHMARK At-Scale (Min) Per-Accelerator (Min)
Recommendation (DLRM) 0.59 (DGX SuperPOD) 12.78 (A100)
NLP (BERT) 0.21 (DGX SuperPOD) 126.95 (A100)
Speech Recognition—Recurrent (RNN-T) 2.15 (DGX SuperPOD) 230.07 (A100)
Object Detection—Heavyweight (Mask R-CNN) 3.09 (DGX SuperPOD) 327.34 (A100)
Object Detection—Lightweight (RetinaNet) 4.25 (DGX SuperPOD) 675.18 (A100)
Image Classification (ResNet-50 v1.5) 0.32 (DGX SuperPOD) 217.82 (A100)
Image Segmentation (3D U-Net) 1.22 (DGX SuperPOD) 170.23 (A100)
Reinforcement Learning (MiniGo) 16.23 (DGX SuperPOD) 2045.4 (A100)

NVIDIA achieved top performance results in all scenarios (data center server and offline, as well as edge single-stream, multi-stream, and offline). In addition, we delivered the best per-accelerator performance among all products tested across all benchmark tests. These results are a testament, not only to NVIDIA's inference performance leadership, but to the versatility of our inference platform.

Offline scenario for data center and edge (Single GPU)

  NVIDIA A100 (x86 CPU)
(Inferences/Second)
NVIDIA A100 (Arm CPU)
(Inferences/Second)
NVIDIA A30
(Inferences/Second)
NVIDIA® Jetson AGX Orin
(Max Inferences/Query)
DLRM
(Recommender)
312,380 281,283 138,194 N/A*
BERT
(Natural Language Processing)
3,490 3,149 1,668 476
ResNet-50 v1.5
(Image Classification)
39,190 36,487 18,406 6,139
ResNet-34
(Large Single-Shot Detector)
990 906 478 208
RNN-T
(Speech Recognition)
13,344 13,188 6,557 1,110
3D U-Net
(Medical Imaging)
3 3 2 0.5

The Technology Behind the Results

The complexity of AI demands a tight integration between all aspects of the platform. As demonstrated in MLPerf’s benchmarks, the NVIDIA AI platform delivers leadership performance with the world’s most advanced GPU, powerful and scalable interconnect technologies, and cutting-edge software—an end-to-end solution that can be deployed in the data center, in the cloud, or at the edge with amazing results.

Pre-trained models and Optimized Software from NVIDIA NGC

Optimized Software that Accelerates AI Workflows

An essential component of NVIDIA’s platform and MLPerf training and inference results, the NGC catalog is a hub for GPU-optimized AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and data analytics software that simplifies and accelerates end-to-end workflows. With over 150 enterprise-grade containers—including workloads for conversational AI and recommender systems, hundreds of AI models, and industry-specific SDKs that can be deployed on premises, in the cloud, or at the edge—NGC enables data scientists, researchers, and developers to build best-in-class solutions, gather insights, and deliver business value faster than ever before.

Leadership-Class AI Infrastructure

Achieving world-leading results across training and inference requires infrastructure that’s purpose-built for the world’s most complex AI challenges. The NVIDIA AI platform is delivered using the power of the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU, the NVIDIA A30 Tensor Core GPU, the NVIDIA A2 Tensor Core GPU, the Jetson AGX Orin module and the scalability and flexibility of NVIDIA interconnect technologies—NVIDIA NVLink®, NVIDIA NVSwitch, and the NVIDIA ConnectX®-6 VPI. These are at the heart of the NVIDIA DGX™ A100, the engine behind our benchmark performance.

NVIDIA DGX systems offer the scalability, rapid deployment, and incredible compute power that enables every enterprise to build leadership-class AI infrastructure.

NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs

Learn more about our data center training and inference product performance.