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

As user demand scales for intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana, 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 opensource IPA workload is an obstacle in addressing this question. In this paper, we 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 then 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 S...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Johann Hauswald, Michael A. Laurenzano, Yunqi Zhang, Cheng Li, Austin Rovinski, Arjun Khurana, Ronald G. Dreslinski, Trevor N. Mudge, Vinicius Petrucci, Lingjia Tang, Jason Mars
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2015, Programming Languages