Engineer – AI Inference Performance

About the team:

The Intelligent Complex Systems Team, currently a part of the Waterloo Research Centre, examines recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to determine its potential for broader applications. This innovative team researches AI challenges such as matching human capabilities and ensuring the safety of collaborative AI systems.

• Develop and maintain real-time and historical performance monitoring tools for AI inference workloads, including profiling tools for various AI model types (small models, LLMs, VLMs, and multimodal systems) in applications like conversational AI, video processing, and real-time analytics.
• Analyze and classify inference workloads based on characteristics like profile, decode, pre/post-processing overheads, and computational complexity to develop tailored optimization strategies.
• Develop performance models that consider the systematic factors of AI inference, including model size, architecture (e.g., transformers, CNNs), application-specific constraints (e.g., latency for conversational AI), and compute resource characteristics (GPU, TPU, CPU, and specialized accelerators).
• Optimize inference workloads across various hardware resources by reducing latency, minimizing memory overhead, and improving throughput. Techniques include quantization, pruning, fusion, and caching.
  
  Ensure that models can scale efficiently across diverse compute platforms, from edge devices to large-scale cloud infrastructures.
• Lead efforts in creating benchmarks for different types of inference tasks. Utilize tools such as NVIDIA Nsight, PyTorch Profiler, and TensorBoard to gain insights into inference performance across diverse hardware platforms.
• Conduct benchmarking and performance comparisons across various hardware platforms (e.g., GPUs, TPUs, edge accelerators) to identify bottlenecks and optimization opportunities. Provide recommendations for software and hardware improvements based on inference throughput, latency, and power consumption.
• Work closely with AI research, software engineering, and DevOps teams to improve the end-to-end AI inference pipeline, ensuring optimized deployments across different production environments.
  
  Collaborate with system architects to incorporate resource-aware optimizations into design practices.
• Develop strategies to ensure the scalability of inference workloads in production environments, considering both model performance and resource scaling, whether in on-premises environments, cloud infrastructure, or edge computing devices.