9,297 research outputs found
FPGA-Based CNN Inference Accelerator Synthesized from Multi-Threaded C Software
A deep-learning inference accelerator is synthesized from a C-language
software program parallelized with Pthreads. The software implementation uses
the well-known producer/consumer model with parallel threads interconnected by
FIFO queues. The LegUp high-level synthesis (HLS) tool synthesizes threads into
parallel FPGA hardware, translating software parallelism into spatial
parallelism. A complete system is generated where convolution, pooling and
padding are realized in the synthesized accelerator, with remaining tasks
executing on an embedded ARM processor. The accelerator incorporates reduced
precision, and a novel approach for zero-weight-skipping in convolution. On a
mid-sized Intel Arria 10 SoC FPGA, peak performance on VGG-16 is 138 effective
GOPS
ReBNet: Residual Binarized Neural Network
This paper proposes ReBNet, an end-to-end framework for training
reconfigurable binary neural networks on software and developing efficient
accelerators for execution on FPGA. Binary neural networks offer an intriguing
opportunity for deploying large-scale deep learning models on
resource-constrained devices. Binarization reduces the memory footprint and
replaces the power-hungry matrix-multiplication with light-weight XnorPopcount
operations. However, binary networks suffer from a degraded accuracy compared
to their fixed-point counterparts. We show that the state-of-the-art methods
for optimizing binary networks accuracy, significantly increase the
implementation cost and complexity. To compensate for the degraded accuracy
while adhering to the simplicity of binary networks, we devise the first
reconfigurable scheme that can adjust the classification accuracy based on the
application. Our proposition improves the classification accuracy by
representing features with multiple levels of residual binarization. Unlike
previous methods, our approach does not exacerbate the area cost of the
hardware accelerator. Instead, it provides a tradeoff between throughput and
accuracy while the area overhead of multi-level binarization is negligible.Comment: To Appear In The 26th IEEE International Symposium on
Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machine
Accelerating sequential programs using FastFlow and self-offloading
FastFlow is a programming environment specifically targeting cache-coherent
shared-memory multi-cores. FastFlow is implemented as a stack of C++ template
libraries built on top of lock-free (fence-free) synchronization mechanisms. In
this paper we present a further evolution of FastFlow enabling programmers to
offload part of their workload on a dynamically created software accelerator
running on unused CPUs. The offloaded function can be easily derived from
pre-existing sequential code. We emphasize in particular the effective
trade-off between human productivity and execution efficiency of the approach.Comment: 17 pages + cove
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