The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is leading to a new generation of hardware accelerators optimized for deep learning. Some of the designs of these accelerators are general enough to allow their use for other computationally intensive tasks beyond AI. Cloud tensor processing units (TPUs) are one such example. Here, we demonstrate a novel approach using TensorFlow on Cloud TPUs to implement a high-resolution imaging technique called full-waveform inversion. Higher-order numerical stencils leverage the efficient matrix multiplication offered by the Cloud TPU, and the halo exchange benefits from the dedicated high-speed interchip connection. The performance is competitive when compared with Tesla V100 graphics processing units and shows promise for future computation- and memory-intensive imaging applications.
@article{arxiv.1912.08063,
title = {High-resolution imaging on TPUs},
author = {Fantine Huot and Yi-Fan Chen and Robert Clapp and Carlos Boneti and John Anderson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.08063},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
12 pages, 6 figures, submitted to ISC High Performance 2020