1,404 research outputs found

    Toolflows for Mapping Convolutional Neural Networks on FPGAs: A Survey and Future Directions

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    In the past decade, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in various Artificial Intelligence tasks. To accelerate the experimentation and development of CNNs, several software frameworks have been released, primarily targeting power-hungry CPUs and GPUs. In this context, reconfigurable hardware in the form of FPGAs constitutes a potential alternative platform that can be integrated in the existing deep learning ecosystem to provide a tunable balance between performance, power consumption and programmability. In this paper, a survey of the existing CNN-to-FPGA toolflows is presented, comprising a comparative study of their key characteristics which include the supported applications, architectural choices, design space exploration methods and achieved performance. Moreover, major challenges and objectives introduced by the latest trends in CNN algorithmic research are identified and presented. Finally, a uniform evaluation methodology is proposed, aiming at the comprehensive, complete and in-depth evaluation of CNN-to-FPGA toolflows.Comment: Accepted for publication at the ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) journal, 201

    Reclaiming Fault Resilience and Energy Efficiency With Enhanced Performance in Low Power Architectures

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    Rapid developments of the AI domain has revolutionized the computing industry by the introduction of state-of-art AI architectures. This growth is also accompanied by a massive increase in the power consumption. Near-Theshold Computing (NTC) has emerged as a viable solution by offering significant savings in power consumption paving the way for an energy efficient design paradigm. However, these benefits are accompanied by a deterioration in performance due to the severe process variation and slower transistor switching at Near-Threshold operation. These problems severely restrict the usage of Near-Threshold operation in commercial applications. In this work, a novel AI architecture, Tensor Processing Unit, operating at NTC is thoroughly investigated to tackle the issues hindering system performance. Research problems are demonstrated in a scientific manner and unique opportunities are explored to propose novel design methodologies

    Time-Optimal and Conflict-Free Mappings of Uniform Dependence Algorithms into Lower Dimensional Processor Arrays

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    Most existing methods of mapping algorithms into processor arrays are restricted to the case where n-dimensional algorithms or algorithms with n nested loops are mapped into (n—l)-dimensional arrays. However, in practice, it is interesting to map n-dimensional algorithms into (k —l)-dimensional arrays where k\u3c.n. For example, many algorithms at bit-level are at least 4-dimensional (matrix multiplication, convolution, LU decomposition, etc.) and most existing bit level processor arrays are 2-dimensional. A computational conflict occurs if two or more computations of an algorithm are mapped into the same processor and the same execution time. In this paper, necessary and sufficient conditions are derived to identify all mappings without computational conflicts, based on the Hermite normal form of the mapping matrix. These conditions are used to propose methods of mapping any n-dimensional algorithm into (k— l)-dimensional arrays, kn—3, optimality of the mapping is guaranteed

    Embracing Low-Power Systems with Improvement in Security and Energy-Efficiency

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    As the economies around the world are aligning more towards usage of computing systems, the global energy demand for computing is increasing rapidly. Additionally, the boom in AI based applications and services has already invited the pervasion of specialized computing hardware architectures for AI (accelerators). A big chunk of research in the industry and academia is being focused on providing energy efficiency to all kinds of power hungry computing architectures. This dissertation adds to these efforts. Aggressive voltage underscaling of chips is one the effective low power paradigms of providing energy efficiency. This dissertation identifies and deals with the reliability and performance problems associated with this paradigm and innovates novel energy efficient approaches. Specifically, the properties of a low power security primitive have been improved and, higher performance has been unlocked in an AI accelerator (Google TPU) in an aggressively voltage underscaled environment. And, novel power saving opportunities have been unlocked by characterizing the usage pattern of a baseline TPU with rigorous mathematical analysis

    Partitioning of Uniform Dependency Algorithms for Parallel Execution on MIMD/ Systolic Systems

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    An algorithm can be modeled as an index set and a set of dependence vectors. Each index vector in the index set indexes a computation of the algorithm. If the execution of a computation depends on the execution of another computation, then this dependency is represented as the difference between the index vectors of the computations. The dependence matrix corresponds to a matrix where each column is a dependence vector. An independent partition of the index set is such that there are no dependencies between computations that belong to different blocks of the partition. This report considers uniform dependence algorithms with any arbitrary kind of index set and proposes two very simple methods to find independent partitions of the index set. Each method has advantages over the other one for certain kind of application, and they both outperform previously proposed approaches in terms of computational complexity and/or optimality. Also, lower bounds and upper bounds of the cardinality of the maximal independent partitions are given. For some algorithms it is shown that the cardinality of the maximal partition is equal to the greatest common divisor of some subdeterminants of the dependence matrix. In an MIMD/multiple systolic array computation environment, if different blocks of ail independent partition are assigned to different processors/arrays, the communications between processors/arrays will be minimized to zero. This is significant because the communications usually dominate the overhead in MIMD machines. Some issues of mapping partitioned algorithms into MIMD/systolic systems are addressed. Based on the theory of partitioning, a new method is proposed to test if a system of linear Diophantine equations has integer solutions

    Parallelization of dynamic programming recurrences in computational biology

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    The rapid growth of biosequence databases over the last decade has led to a performance bottleneck in the applications analyzing them. In particular, over the last five years DNA sequencing capacity of next-generation sequencers has been doubling every six months as costs have plummeted. The data produced by these sequencers is overwhelming traditional compute systems. We believe that in the future compute performance, not sequencing, will become the bottleneck in advancing genome science. In this work, we investigate novel computing platforms to accelerate dynamic programming algorithms, which are popular in bioinformatics workloads. We study algorithm-specific hardware architectures that exploit fine-grained parallelism in dynamic programming kernels using field-programmable gate arrays: FPGAs). We advocate a high-level synthesis approach, using the recurrence equation abstraction to represent dynamic programming and polyhedral analysis to exploit parallelism. We suggest a novel technique within the polyhedral model to optimize for throughput by pipelining independent computations on an array. This design technique improves on the state of the art, which builds latency-optimal arrays. We also suggest a method to dynamically switch between a family of designs using FPGA reconfiguration to achieve a significant performance boost. We have used polyhedral methods to parallelize the Nussinov RNA folding algorithm to build a family of accelerators that can trade resources for parallelism and are between 15-130x faster than a modern dual core CPU implementation. A Zuker RNA folding accelerator we built on a single workstation with four Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGAs outperforms 198 3 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processors. Furthermore, our design running on a single FPGA is an order of magnitude faster than competing implementations on similar-generation FPGAs and graphics processors. Our work is a step toward the goal of automated synthesis of hardware accelerators for dynamic programming algorithms

    AI/ML Algorithms and Applications in VLSI Design and Technology

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    An evident challenge ahead for the integrated circuit (IC) industry in the nanometer regime is the investigation and development of methods that can reduce the design complexity ensuing from growing process variations and curtail the turnaround time of chip manufacturing. Conventional methodologies employed for such tasks are largely manual; thus, time-consuming and resource-intensive. In contrast, the unique learning strategies of artificial intelligence (AI) provide numerous exciting automated approaches for handling complex and data-intensive tasks in very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design and testing. Employing AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms in VLSI design and manufacturing reduces the time and effort for understanding and processing the data within and across different abstraction levels via automated learning algorithms. It, in turn, improves the IC yield and reduces the manufacturing turnaround time. This paper thoroughly reviews the AI/ML automated approaches introduced in the past towards VLSI design and manufacturing. Moreover, we discuss the scope of AI/ML applications in the future at various abstraction levels to revolutionize the field of VLSI design, aiming for high-speed, highly intelligent, and efficient implementations
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