Efficient Hardware Architectures for Accelerating Deep Neural Networks: Survey

In the modern-day era of technology, a paradigm shift has been witnessed in the areas involving applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL). Specifically, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have emerged as a popular field of interest in most AI applications such as computer vision, image and video processing, robotics, etc. In the context of developed digital technologies and the availability of authentic data and data handling infrastructure, DNNs have been a credible choice for solving more complex real-life problems. The performance and accuracy of a DNN is a way better than human intelligence in certain situations. However, it is noteworthy that the DNN is computationally too cumbersome in terms of the resources and time to handle these computations. Furthermore, general-purpose architectures like CPUs have issues in handling such computationally intensive algorithms. Therefore, a lot of interest and efforts have been invested by the research fraternity in specialized hardware architectures such as Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), and Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) in the context of effective implementation of computationally intensive algorithms. This paper brings forward the various research works carried out on the development and deployment of DNNs using the aforementioned specialized hardware architectures and embedded AI accelerators. The review discusses the detailed description of the specialized hardware-based accelerators used in the training and/or inference of DNN. A comparative study based on factors like power, area, and throughput, is also made on the various accelerators discussed. Finally, future research and development directions are discussed, such as future trends in DNN implementation on specialized hardware accelerators. This review article is intended to serve as a guide for hardware architectures for accelerating and improving the effectiveness of deep learning research.publishedVersio

Reconfigurable acceleration of Recurrent Neural Networks

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been successful in a wide range of applications involving temporal sequences such as natural language processing, speech recognition and video analysis. However, RNNs often require a significant amount of memory and computational resources. In addition, the recurrent nature and data dependencies in RNN computations can lead to system stall, resulting in low throughput and high latency. This work describes novel parallel hardware architectures for accelerating RNN inference using Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology, which considers the data dependencies and high computational costs of RNNs. The first contribution of this thesis is a latency-hiding architecture that utilizes column-wise matrix-vector multiplication instead of the conventional row-wise operation to eliminate data dependencies and improve the throughput of RNN inference designs. This architecture is further enhanced by a configurable checkerboard tiling strategy which allows large dimensions of weight matrices, while supporting element-based parallelism and vector-based parallelism. The presented reconfigurable RNN designs show significant speedup over CPU, GPU, and other FPGA designs. The second contribution of this thesis is a weight reuse approach for large RNN models with weights stored in off-chip memory, running with a batch size of one. A novel blocking-batching strategy is proposed to optimize the throughput of large RNN designs on FPGAs by reusing the RNN weights. Performance analysis is also introduced to enable FPGA designs to achieve the best trade-off between area, power consumption and performance. Promising power efficiency improvement has been achieved in addition to speeding up over CPU and GPU designs. The third contribution of this thesis is a low latency design for RNNs based on a partially-folded hardware architecture. It also introduces a technique that balances initiation interval of multi-layer RNN inferences to increase hardware efficiency and throughput while reducing latency. The approach is evaluated on a variety of applications, including gravitational wave detection and Bayesian RNN-based ECG anomaly detection. To facilitate the use of this approach, we open source an RNN template which enables the generation of low-latency FPGA designs with efficient resource utilization using high-level synthesis tools.Open Acces

Hardware Implementation of Deep Network Accelerators Towards Healthcare and Biomedical Applications

With the advent of dedicated Deep Learning (DL) accelerators and neuromorphic processors, new opportunities are emerging for applying deep and Spiking Neural Network (SNN) algorithms to healthcare and biomedical applications at the edge. This can facilitate the advancement of the medical Internet of Things (IoT) systems and Point of Care (PoC) devices. In this paper, we provide a tutorial describing how various technologies ranging from emerging memristive devices, to established Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), and mature Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology can be used to develop efficient DL accelerators to solve a wide variety of diagnostic, pattern recognition, and signal processing problems in healthcare. Furthermore, we explore how spiking neuromorphic processors can complement their DL counterparts for processing biomedical signals. After providing the required background, we unify the sparsely distributed research on neural network and neuromorphic hardware implementations as applied to the healthcare domain. In addition, we benchmark various hardware platforms by performing a biomedical electromyography (EMG) signal processing task and drawing comparisons among them in terms of inference delay and energy. Finally, we provide our analysis of the field and share a perspective on the advantages, disadvantages, challenges, and opportunities that different accelerators and neuromorphic processors introduce to healthcare and biomedical domains. This paper can serve a large audience, ranging from nanoelectronics researchers, to biomedical and healthcare practitioners in grasping the fundamental interplay between hardware, algorithms, and clinical adoption of these tools, as we shed light on the future of deep networks and spiking neuromorphic processing systems as proponents for driving biomedical circuits and systems forward.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems (21 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables

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

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

FPGA-based high-performance neural network acceleration

In the last ten years, Artificial Intelligence through Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has penetrated virtually every aspect of science, technology, and business. Advances are rapid with thousands of papers being published annually. Many types of DNNs have been and continue to be developed -- in this thesis, we address Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) -- each with a different set of target applications and implementation challenges. The overall problem for all of these Neural Networks (NNs) is that their target applications generally pose stringent constraints on latency and throughput, but also have strict accuracy requirements. Much research has therefore gone into all aspects of improving NN quality and performance: algorithms, code optimization, acceleration with GPUs, and acceleration with hardware, both dedicated ASICs and off-the-shelf FPGAs. In this thesis, we concentrate on the last of these approaches. There have been many previous efforts in creating hardware to accelerate NNs. The problem designers face is that optimal NN models typically have significant irregularities, making them hardware unfriendly. One commonly used approach is to train NN models to follow regular computation and data patterns. This approach, however, can hurt the models' accuracy or lead to models with non-negligible redundancies. This dissertation takes a different approach. Instead of regularizing the model, we create architectures friendly to irregular models. Our thesis is that high-accuracy and high-performance NN inference and training can be achieved by creating a series of novel irregularity-aware architectures for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). In four different studies on four different NN types, we find that this approach results in speedups of 2.1x to 3255x compared with carefully selected prior art; for inference, there is no change in accuracy. The bulk of this dissertation revolves around these studies, the various workload balancing techniques, and the resulting NN acceleration architectures. In particular, we propose four different architectures to handle, respectively, data structure level, operation level, bit level, and model level irregularities. At the data structure level, we propose AWB-GCN, which uses runtime workload rebalancing to handle Sparse Matrices Multiplications (SpMM) on extremely sparse and unbalanced input. With GNN inference as a case study, AWB-GCN achieves over 90% system efficiency, guarantees efficient off-chip memory access, and provides considerable speedups over CPUs (3255x), GPUs (80x), and a prior ASIC accelerator (5.1x). At the operation level, we propose O3BNN-R, which can detect redundant operations and prune them at run time. This works even for those that are highly data-dependent and unpredictable. With Binarized NNs (BNNs) as a case study, O3BNN-R can prune over 30% of the operations, without any accuracy loss, yielding speedups over state-of-the-art implementations on CPUs (1122x), GPUs (2.3x), and FPGAs (2.1x). At the bit level, we propose CQNN. CQNN embeds a Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA) which can be programmed at runtime to support NN functions with various data-width requirements. Results show that CQNN can deliver us-level Quantized NN (QNN) inference. At the model level, we propose FPDeep, especially for training. In order to address model-level irregularity, FPDeep uses a novel model partitioning schemes to balance workload and storage among nodes. By using a hybrid of model and layer parallelism to train DNNs, FPDeep avoids the large gap that commonly occurs between training and testing accuracy due to the improper convergence to sharp minimizers (caused by large training batches). Results show that FPDeep provides scalable, fast, and accurate training and leads to 6.6x higher energy efficiency than GPUs

Towards Efficient Hardware Acceleration of Deep Neural Networks on FPGA

Deep neural network (DNN) has achieved remarkable success in many applications because of its powerful capability for data processing. Their performance in computer vision have matched and in some areas even surpassed human capabilities. Deep neural networks can capture complex nonlinear features; however this ability comes at the cost of high computational and memory requirements. State-of-art networks require billions of arithmetic operations and millions of parameters. The brute-force computing model of DNN often requires extremely large hardware resources, introducing severe concerns on its scalability running on traditional von Neumann architecture. The well-known memory wall, and latency brought by the long-range connectivity and communication of DNN severely constrain the computation efficiency of DNN. The acceleration techniques of DNN, either software or hardware, often suffer from poor hardware execution efficiency of the simplified model (software), or inevitable accuracy degradation and limited supportable algorithms (hardware), respectively. In order to preserve the inference accuracy and make the hardware implementation in a more efficient form, a close investigation to the hardware/software co-design methodologies for DNNs is needed. The proposed work first presents an FPGA-based implementation framework for Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) acceleration. At architectural level, we improve the parallelism of RNN training scheme and reduce the computing resource requirement for computation efficiency enhancement. The hardware implementation primarily targets at reducing data communication load. Secondly, we propose a data locality-aware sparse matrix and vector multiplication (SpMV) kernel. At software level, we reorganize a large sparse matrix into many modest-sized blocks by adopting hypergraph-based partitioning and clustering. Available hardware constraints have been taken into consideration for the memory allocation and data access regularization. Thirdly, we present a holistic acceleration to sparse convolutional neural network (CNN). During network training, the data locality is regularized to ease the hardware mapping. The distributed architecture enables high computation parallelism and data reuse. The proposed research results in an hardware/software co-design methodology for fast and accurate DNN acceleration, through the innovations in algorithm optimization, hardware implementation, and the interactive design process across these two domains

Multi-LSTM Acceleration and CNN Fault Tolerance

This thesis addresses the following two problems related to the field of Machine Learning: the acceleration of multiple Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models on FPGAs and the fault tolerance of compressed Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). LSTMs represent an effective solution to capture long-term dependencies in sequential data, like sentences in Natural Language Processing applications, video frames in Scene Labeling tasks or temporal series in Time Series Forecasting. In order to further boost their efficacy, especially in presence of long sequences, multiple LSTM models are utilized in a Hierarchical and Stacked fashion. However, because of their memory-bounded nature, efficient mapping of multiple LSTMs on a computing device becomes even more challenging. The first part of this thesis addresses the problem of mapping multiple LSTM models to a FPGA device by introducing a framework that modifies their memory requirements according to the target architecture. For the similar accuracy loss, the proposed framework maps multiple LSTMs with a performance improvement of 3x to 5x over state-of-the-art approaches. In the second part of this thesis, we investigate the fault tolerance of CNNs, another effective deep learning architecture. CNNs represent a dominating solution in image classification tasks, but suffer from a high performance cost, due to their computational structure. In fact, due to their large parameter space, fetching their data from main memory typically becomes a performance bottleneck. In order to tackle the problem, various techniques for their parameters compression have been developed, such as weight pruning, weight clustering and weight quantization. However, reducing the memory footprint of an application can lead to its data becoming more sensitive to faults. For this thesis work, we have conducted an analysis to verify the conditions for applying OddECC, a mechanism that supports variable strength and size ECCs for different memory regions. Our experiments reveal that compressed CNNs, which have their memory footprint reduced up to 86.3x by utilizing the aforementioned compression schemes, exhibit accuracy drops up to 13.56% in presence of random single bit faults