22,341 research outputs found
NullHop: A Flexible Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator Based on Sparse Representations of Feature Maps
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become the dominant neural network
architecture for solving many state-of-the-art (SOA) visual processing tasks.
Even though Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are most often used in training
and deploying CNNs, their power efficiency is less than 10 GOp/s/W for
single-frame runtime inference. We propose a flexible and efficient CNN
accelerator architecture called NullHop that implements SOA CNNs useful for
low-power and low-latency application scenarios. NullHop exploits the sparsity
of neuron activations in CNNs to accelerate the computation and reduce memory
requirements. The flexible architecture allows high utilization of available
computing resources across kernel sizes ranging from 1x1 to 7x7. NullHop can
process up to 128 input and 128 output feature maps per layer in a single pass.
We implemented the proposed architecture on a Xilinx Zynq FPGA platform and
present results showing how our implementation reduces external memory
transfers and compute time in five different CNNs ranging from small ones up to
the widely known large VGG16 and VGG19 CNNs. Post-synthesis simulations using
Mentor Modelsim in a 28nm process with a clock frequency of 500 MHz show that
the VGG19 network achieves over 450 GOp/s. By exploiting sparsity, NullHop
achieves an efficiency of 368%, maintains over 98% utilization of the MAC
units, and achieves a power efficiency of over 3TOp/s/W in a core area of
6.3mm. As further proof of NullHop's usability, we interfaced its FPGA
implementation with a neuromorphic event camera for real time interactive
demonstrations
FastDeepIoT: Towards Understanding and Optimizing Neural Network Execution Time on Mobile and Embedded Devices
Deep neural networks show great potential as solutions to many sensing
application problems, but their excessive resource demand slows down execution
time, pausing a serious impediment to deployment on low-end devices. To address
this challenge, recent literature focused on compressing neural network size to
improve performance. We show that changing neural network size does not
proportionally affect performance attributes of interest, such as execution
time. Rather, extreme run-time nonlinearities exist over the network
configuration space. Hence, we propose a novel framework, called FastDeepIoT,
that uncovers the non-linear relation between neural network structure and
execution time, then exploits that understanding to find network configurations
that significantly improve the trade-off between execution time and accuracy on
mobile and embedded devices. FastDeepIoT makes two key contributions. First,
FastDeepIoT automatically learns an accurate and highly interpretable execution
time model for deep neural networks on the target device. This is done without
prior knowledge of either the hardware specifications or the detailed
implementation of the used deep learning library. Second, FastDeepIoT informs a
compression algorithm how to minimize execution time on the profiled device
without impacting accuracy. We evaluate FastDeepIoT using three different
sensing-related tasks on two mobile devices: Nexus 5 and Galaxy Nexus.
FastDeepIoT further reduces the neural network execution time by to
and energy consumption by to compared with the
state-of-the-art compression algorithms.Comment: Accepted by SenSys '1
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