Sirius: An Open End-to-End Voice and Vision Personal Assistant (Like Siri) and Its Implications for Future Warehouse Scale Computers

Jason Mars (University of Michigan)

Abstract: As user demand scales for intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, and recently Amazon's Echo, 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 talk, I 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 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 FPGAs. 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 real system 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.