TorchBench: Benchmarking PyTorch with High API Surface Coverage

Abstract: Deep learning (DL) has been a revolutionary technique in various domains. To facilitate the model development and deployment, many deep learning frameworks are proposed, among which PyTorch is one of the most popular solutions. The performance of ecosystem around PyTorch is critically important, which saves the costs of training models and reduces the response time of model inferences. In this paper, we propose TorchBench, a novel benchmark suite to study the performance of PyTorch software stack. Unlike existing benchmark suites, TorchBench encloses many representative models, covering a large PyTorch API surface. TorchBench is able to comprehensively characterize the performance of the PyTorch software stack, guiding the performance optimization across models, PyTorch framework, and GPU libraries. We show two practical use cases of TorchBench. (1) We profile TorchBench to identify GPU performance inefficiencies in PyTorch. We are able to optimize many performance bugs and upstream patches to the official PyTorch repository. (2) We integrate TorchBench into PyTorch continuous integration system. We are able to identify performance regression in multiple daily code checkins to prevent PyTorch repository from introducing performance bugs. TorchBench is open source and keeps evolving.