954 research outputs found
ReDy: A Novel ReRAM-centric Dynamic Quantization Approach for Energy-efficient CNN Inference
The primary operation in DNNs is the dot product of quantized input
activations and weights. Prior works have proposed the design of memory-centric
architectures based on the Processing-In-Memory (PIM) paradigm. Resistive RAM
(ReRAM) technology is especially appealing for PIM-based DNN accelerators due
to its high density to store weights, low leakage energy, low read latency, and
high performance capabilities to perform the DNN dot-products massively in
parallel within the ReRAM crossbars. However, the main bottleneck of these
architectures is the energy-hungry analog-to-digital conversions (ADCs)
required to perform analog computations in-ReRAM, which penalizes the
efficiency and performance benefits of PIM. To improve energy-efficiency of
in-ReRAM analog dot-product computations we present ReDy, a hardware
accelerator that implements a ReRAM-centric Dynamic quantization scheme to take
advantage of the bit serial streaming and processing of activations. The energy
consumption of ReRAM-based DNN accelerators is directly proportional to the
numerical precision of the input activations of each DNN layer. In particular,
ReDy exploits that activations of CONV layers from Convolutional Neural
Networks (CNNs), a subset of DNNs, are commonly grouped according to the size
of their filters and the size of the ReRAM crossbars. Then, ReDy quantizes
on-the-fly each group of activations with a different numerical precision based
on a novel heuristic that takes into account the statistical distribution of
each group. Overall, ReDy greatly reduces the activity of the ReRAM crossbars
and the number of A/D conversions compared to an static 8-bit uniform
quantization. We evaluate ReDy on a popular set of modern CNNs. On average,
ReDy provides 13\% energy savings over an ISAAC-like accelerator with
negligible accuracy loss and area overhead.Comment: 13 pages, 16 figures, 4 Table
GraphR: Accelerating Graph Processing Using ReRAM
This paper presents GRAPHR, the first ReRAM-based graph processing
accelerator. GRAPHR follows the principle of near-data processing and explores
the opportunity of performing massive parallel analog operations with low
hardware and energy cost. The analog computation is suit- able for graph
processing because: 1) The algorithms are iterative and could inherently
tolerate the imprecision; 2) Both probability calculation (e.g., PageRank and
Collaborative Filtering) and typical graph algorithms involving integers (e.g.,
BFS/SSSP) are resilient to errors. The key insight of GRAPHR is that if a
vertex program of a graph algorithm can be expressed in sparse matrix vector
multiplication (SpMV), it can be efficiently performed by ReRAM crossbar. We
show that this assumption is generally true for a large set of graph
algorithms. GRAPHR is a novel accelerator architecture consisting of two
components: memory ReRAM and graph engine (GE). The core graph computations are
performed in sparse matrix format in GEs (ReRAM crossbars). The
vector/matrix-based graph computation is not new, but ReRAM offers the unique
opportunity to realize the massive parallelism with unprecedented energy
efficiency and low hardware cost. With small subgraphs processed by GEs, the
gain of performing parallel operations overshadows the wastes due to sparsity.
The experiment results show that GRAPHR achieves a 16.01x (up to 132.67x)
speedup and a 33.82x energy saving on geometric mean compared to a CPU baseline
system. Com- pared to GPU, GRAPHR achieves 1.69x to 2.19x speedup and consumes
4.77x to 8.91x less energy. GRAPHR gains a speedup of 1.16x to 4.12x, and is
3.67x to 10.96x more energy efficiency compared to PIM-based architecture.Comment: Accepted to HPCA 201
FPSA: A Full System Stack Solution for Reconfigurable ReRAM-based NN Accelerator Architecture
Neural Network (NN) accelerators with emerging ReRAM (resistive random access
memory) technologies have been investigated as one of the promising solutions
to address the \textit{memory wall} challenge, due to the unique capability of
\textit{processing-in-memory} within ReRAM-crossbar-based processing elements
(PEs). However, the high efficiency and high density advantages of ReRAM have
not been fully utilized due to the huge communication demands among PEs and the
overhead of peripheral circuits.
In this paper, we propose a full system stack solution, composed of a
reconfigurable architecture design, Field Programmable Synapse Array (FPSA) and
its software system including neural synthesizer, temporal-to-spatial mapper,
and placement & routing. We highly leverage the software system to make the
hardware design compact and efficient. To satisfy the high-performance
communication demand, we optimize it with a reconfigurable routing architecture
and the placement & routing tool. To improve the computational density, we
greatly simplify the PE circuit with the spiking schema and then adopt neural
synthesizer to enable the high density computation-resources to support
different kinds of NN operations. In addition, we provide spiking memory blocks
(SMBs) and configurable logic blocks (CLBs) in hardware and leverage the
temporal-to-spatial mapper to utilize them to balance the storage and
computation requirements of NN. Owing to the end-to-end software system, we can
efficiently deploy existing deep neural networks to FPSA. Evaluations show
that, compared to one of state-of-the-art ReRAM-based NN accelerators, PRIME,
the computational density of FPSA improves by 31x; for representative NNs, its
inference performance can achieve up to 1000x speedup.Comment: Accepted by ASPLOS 201
Neuro-memristive Circuits for Edge Computing: A review
The volume, veracity, variability, and velocity of data produced from the
ever-increasing network of sensors connected to Internet pose challenges for
power management, scalability, and sustainability of cloud computing
infrastructure. Increasing the data processing capability of edge computing
devices at lower power requirements can reduce several overheads for cloud
computing solutions. This paper provides the review of neuromorphic
CMOS-memristive architectures that can be integrated into edge computing
devices. We discuss why the neuromorphic architectures are useful for edge
devices and show the advantages, drawbacks and open problems in the field of
neuro-memristive circuits for edge computing
A Complementary Resistive Switch-based Crossbar Array Adder
Redox-based resistive switching devices (ReRAM) are an emerging class of
non-volatile storage elements suited for nanoscale memory applications. In
terms of logic operations, ReRAM devices were suggested to be used as
programmable interconnects, large-scale look-up tables or for sequential logic
operations. However, without additional selector devices these approaches are
not suited for use in large scale nanocrossbar memory arrays, which is the
preferred architecture for ReRAM devices due to the minimum area consumption.
To overcome this issue for the sequential logic approach, we recently
introduced a novel concept, which is suited for passive crossbar arrays using
complementary resistive switches (CRSs). CRS cells offer two high resistive
storage states, and thus, parasitic sneak currents are efficiently avoided.
However, until now the CRS-based logic-in-memory approach was only shown to be
able to perform basic Boolean logic operations using a single CRS cell. In this
paper, we introduce two multi-bit adder schemes using the CRS-based
logic-in-memory approach. We proof the concepts by means of SPICE simulations
using a dynamical memristive device model of a ReRAM cell. Finally, we show the
advantages of our novel adder concept in terms of step count and number of
devices in comparison to a recently published adder approach, which applies the
conventional ReRAM-based sequential logic concept introduced by Borghetti et
al.Comment: 12 pages, accepted for IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics
in Circuits and Systems (JETCAS), issue on Computing in Emerging Technologie
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