  Artificial intelligence (AI) methods have become critical in scientific
applications to help accelerate scientific discovery. Large language models
(LLMs) are being considered as a promising approach to address some of the
challenging problems because of their superior generalization capabilities
across domains. The effectiveness of the models and the accuracy of the
applications is contingent upon their efficient execution on the underlying
hardware infrastructure. Specialized AI accelerator hardware systems have
recently become available for accelerating AI applications. However, the
comparative performance of these AI accelerators on large language models has
not been previously studied. In this paper, we systematically study LLMs on
multiple AI accelerators and GPUs and evaluate their performance
characteristics for these models. We evaluate these systems with (i) a
micro-benchmark using a core transformer block, (ii) a GPT- 2 model, and (iii)
an LLM-driven science use case, GenSLM. We present our findings and analyses of
the models' performance to better understand the intrinsic capabilities of AI
accelerators. Furthermore, our analysis takes into account key factors such as
sequence lengths, scaling behavior, sparsity, and sensitivity to gradient
accumulation steps.
