# Performance and Power: Systematic Evaluation of AI Workloads on Accelerators with CARAML

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12994 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12994/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [Efficient Large-Scale Language Model Training on GPU Clusters Using Megatron-LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04473/) (2021)
- [Carbon Emissions and Large Neural Network Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10350/) (2021)
- [Reducing Activation Recomputation in Large Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05198/) (2022)
- [Horovod: fast and easy distributed deep learning in TensorFlow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05799/) (2018)
- [Estimating the Carbon Footprint of BLOOM, a 176B Parameter Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02001/) (2022)
- [MLPerf Inference Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02549/) (2019)
- [MLPerf Training Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01500/) (2019)
- [Dissecting the Graphcore IPU Architecture via Microbenchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03413/) (2019)
- [MLPerf HPC: A Holistic Benchmark Suite for Scientific Machine Learning on HPC Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11466/) (2021)
- [Many Cores, Many Models: GPU Programming Model vs. Vendor Compatibility Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05445/) (2023)
- [Application-Driven Exascale: The JUPITER Benchmark Suite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17211/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DABench-LLM: Standardized and In-Depth Benchmarking of Post-Moore Dataflow AI Accelerators for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19904/) (2025)
- [Beyond Independent Optimization: Compression, MoE Routing, and Quantization Interactions in Multimodal Edge Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20981/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid advancement of machine learning (ML) technologies has driven the development of specialized hardware accelerators designed to facilitate more efficient model training. This paper introduces the CARAML benchmark suite, which is employed to assess performance and energy consumption during the training of transformer-based large language models and computer vision models on a range of hardware accelerators, including systems from NVIDIA, AMD, and Graphcore. CARAML provides a compact, automated, extensible, and reproducible framework for assessing the performance and energy of ML workloads across various novel hardware architectures. The design and implementation of CARAML, along with a custom power measurement tool called jpwr, are discussed in detail.