  The impact of the maximally possible batch size (for the better runtime) on
performance of graphic processing units (GPU) and tensor processing units (TPU)
during training and inference phases is investigated. The numerous runs of the
selected deep neural network (DNN) were performed on the standard MNIST and
Fashion-MNIST datasets. The significant speedup was obtained even for extremely
low-scale usage of Google TPUv2 units (8 cores only) in comparison to the quite
powerful GPU NVIDIA Tesla K80 card with the speedup up to 10x for training
stage (without taking into account the overheads) and speedup up to 2x for
prediction stage (with and without taking into account overheads). The precise
speedup values depend on the utilization level of TPUv2 units and increase with
the increase of the data volume under processing, but for the datasets used in
this work (MNIST and Fashion-MNIST with images of sizes 28x28) the speedup was
observed for batch sizes >512 images for training phase and >40 000 images for
prediction phase. It should be noted that these results were obtained without
detriment to the prediction accuracy and loss that were equal for both GPU and
TPU runs up to the 3rd significant digit for MNIST dataset, and up to the 2nd
significant digit for Fashion-MNIST dataset.
