论文标题
神经机器翻译系统的生态足迹
The Ecological Footprint of Neural Machine Translation Systems
论文作者
论文摘要
在过去的十年中,深度学习(DL)导致了人工智能各个领域的重大进步,包括机器翻译(MT)。如果没有不断增长的数据和允许有效训练大型DL模型的硬件,这些进步将是不可能的。由于大量的计算核心以及专用内存,与中央处理单元(CPU)相比,图形处理单元(GPU)是训练和使用DL模型推理的更有效的硬件解决方案。但是,前者非常要求力量。电力消耗具有经济和生态影响。 本章重点介绍神经MT系统的生态足迹。它从训练和推理神经MT模型的推理开始,并从二氧化碳排放方面向环境造成影响。比较了不同的体系结构(RNN和变压器)和不同的GPU(消费者颗粒NVIDIA 1080TI和Workstation级NVIDIA P100)。然后,为爱尔兰和荷兰计算总体二氧化碳卸载。将NMT模型及其生态影响与常见的家用电器进行了比较,以绘制更清晰的画面。 本章的最后一部分分析了量化,这是一种减少模型的大小和复杂性的技术,以减少功耗。由于量化的模型可以在CPU上运行,因此它们提供了一个强大的推理解决方案,而无需依赖GPU。
Over the past decade, deep learning (DL) has led to significant advancements in various fields of artificial intelligence, including machine translation (MT). These advancements would not be possible without the ever-growing volumes of data and the hardware that allows large DL models to be trained efficiently. Due to the large amount of computing cores as well as dedicated memory, graphics processing units (GPUs) are a more effective hardware solution for training and inference with DL models than central processing units (CPUs). However, the former is very power demanding. The electrical power consumption has economical as well as ecological implications. This chapter focuses on the ecological footprint of neural MT systems. It starts from the power drain during the training of and the inference with neural MT models and moves towards the environment impact, in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. Different architectures (RNN and Transformer) and different GPUs (consumer-grate NVidia 1080Ti and workstation-grade NVidia P100) are compared. Then, the overall CO2 offload is calculated for Ireland and the Netherlands. The NMT models and their ecological impact are compared to common household appliances to draw a more clear picture. The last part of this chapter analyses quantization, a technique for reducing the size and complexity of models, as a way to reduce power consumption. As quantized models can run on CPUs, they present a power-efficient inference solution without depending on a GPU.