29,332 research outputs found
FIFO Communication Models in Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Computing
Increasing demands upon embedded systems for higher level services like networking, user interfaces and file system management, are driving growth in fully-featured operating systems such as embedded Linux. In reconfigurable System-on-Chip (rSoC) design, a critical issue is efficient integration of custom hardware and software resources, where efficiency must be considered in terms of both design time and run time. Process networks communicating via FIFO queues are a powerful model for real time digital system design, especially for data streaming applications such as multimedia devices. FIFOs also form a central part of Unix and Linux Interprocess Communication (IPC) architectures, where they are more commonly known as pipes. In this paper, we expand on this observation and show how the combination of embedded Linux, reconfigurable System-on-Chip, and FIFO communication models provide a compelling platform for efficient design- and run-time implementation of complex, high performance embedded systems
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
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
Cycle-accurate evaluation of reconfigurable photonic networks-on-chip
There is little doubt that the most important limiting factors of the performance of next-generation Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs) will be the power efficiency and the available communication speed between cores. Photonic Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) have been suggested as a viable route to relieve the off- and on-chip interconnection bottleneck. Low-loss integrated optical waveguides can transport very high-speed data signals over longer distances as compared to on-chip electrical signaling. In addition, with the development of silicon microrings, photonic switches can be integrated to route signals in a data-transparent way. Although several photonic NoC proposals exist, their use is often limited to the communication of large data messages due to a relatively long set-up time of the photonic channels. In this work, we evaluate a reconfigurable photonic NoC in which the topology is adapted automatically (on a microsecond scale) to the evolving traffic situation by use of silicon microrings. To evaluate this system's performance, the proposed architecture has been implemented in a detailed full-system cycle-accurate simulator which is capable of generating realistic workloads and traffic patterns. In addition, a model was developed to estimate the power consumption of the full interconnection network which was compared with other photonic and electrical NoC solutions. We find that our proposed network architecture significantly lowers the average memory access latency (35% reduction) while only generating a modest increase in power consumption (20%), compared to a conventional concentrated mesh electrical signaling approach. When comparing our solution to high-speed circuit-switched photonic NoCs, long photonic channel set-up times can be tolerated which makes our approach directly applicable to current shared-memory CMPs
Lessons learned from the design of a mobile multimedia system in the Moby Dick project
Recent advances in wireless networking technology and the exponential development of semiconductor technology have engendered a new paradigm of computing, called personal mobile computing or ubiquitous computing. This offers a vision of the future with a much richer and more exciting set of architecture research challenges than extrapolations of the current desktop architectures. In particular, these devices will have limited battery resources, will handle diverse data types, and will operate in environments that are insecure, dynamic and which vary significantly in time and location. The research performed in the MOBY DICK project is about designing such a mobile multimedia system. This paper discusses the approach made in the MOBY DICK project to solve some of these problems, discusses its contributions, and accesses what was learned from the project
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