oneDNN Graph Compiler: A Hybrid Approach for High-Performance Deep Learning Compilation

With the rapid development of deep learning models and hardware support for dense computing, the deep learning (DL) workload characteristics changed significantly from a few hot spots on compute-intensive operations to a broad range of operations scattered across the models. Accelerating a few compute-intensive operations using the expert-tuned implementation of primitives does not fully exploit the performance potential of AI hardware. Various efforts are made to compile a full deep neural network (DNN) graph. One of the biggest challenges is to achieve end-to-end compilation by generating expert-level performance code for the dense compute-intensive operations and applying compilation optimization at the scope of DNN computation graph across multiple compute-intensive operations. We present oneDNN Graph Compiler, a tensor compiler that employs a hybrid approach of using techniques from both compiler optimization and expert-tuned kernels for high-performance code generation of the deep neural network graph. oneDNN Graph Compiler addresses unique optimization challenges in the deep learning domain, such as low-precision computation, aggressive fusion, optimization for static tensor shapes and memory layout, constant weight optimization, and memory buffer reuse. Experimental results demonstrate up to 2x performance gains over primitives-based optimization for performance-critical DNN computation graph patterns on Intel Xeon Scalable Processors.