417 research outputs found
Extended Bit-Plane Compression for Convolutional Neural Network Accelerators
After the tremendous success of convolutional neural networks in image
classification, object detection, speech recognition, etc., there is now rising
demand for deployment of these compute-intensive ML models on tightly power
constrained embedded and mobile systems at low cost as well as for pushing the
throughput in data centers. This has triggered a wave of research towards
specialized hardware accelerators. Their performance is often constrained by
I/O bandwidth and the energy consumption is dominated by I/O transfers to
off-chip memory. We introduce and evaluate a novel, hardware-friendly
compression scheme for the feature maps present within convolutional neural
networks. We show that an average compression ratio of 4.4x relative to
uncompressed data and a gain of 60% over existing method can be achieved for
ResNet-34 with a compression block requiring <300 bit of sequential cells and
minimal combinational logic
Extended Bit-Plane Compression for Convolutional Neural Network Accelerators
After the tremendous success of convolutional neural networks in image classification, object detection, speech recognition, etc., there is now rising demand for deployment of these compute-intensive ML models on tightly power constrained embedded and mobile systems at low cost as well as for pushing the throughput in data centers. This has triggered a wave of research towards specialized hardware accelerators. Their performance is often constrained by I/O bandwidth and the energy consumption is dominated by I/O transfers to off-chip memory. We introduce and evaluate a novel, hardware-friendly compression scheme for the feature maps present within convolutional neural networks. We show that an average compression ratio of 4.4
7 relative to uncompressed data and a gain of 60% over existing method can be achieved for ResNet-34 with a compression block requiring <300 bit of sequential cells and minimal combinational logic
EBPC: Extended Bit-Plane Compression for Deep Neural Network Inference and Training Accelerators
In the wake of the success of convolutional neural networks in image classification, object recognition, speech recognition, etc., the demand for deploying these compute-intensive ML models on embedded and mobile systems with tight power and energy constraints at low cost, as well as for boosting throughput in data centers, is growing rapidly. This has sparked a surge of research into specialized hardware accelerators. Their performance is typically limited by I/O bandwidth, power consumption is dominated by I/O transfers to off-chip memory, and on-chip memories occupy a large part of the silicon area. We introduce and evaluate a novel, hardware-friendly, and lossless compression scheme for the feature maps present within convolutional neural networks. We present hardware architectures and synthesis results for the compressor and decompressor in 65 nm. With a throughput of one 8-bit word/cycle at 600 MHz, they fit into 2.8 kGE and 3.0 kGE of silicon area, respectively - together the size of less than seven 8-bit multiply-add units at the same throughput. We show that an average compression ratio of 5.1
7 for AlexNet, 4 for VGG-16, 2.4
7 for ResNet-34 and 2.2
7 for MobileNetV2 can be achieved - a gain of 45-70% over existing methods. Our approach also works effectively for various number formats, has a low frame-to-frame variance on the compression ratio, and achieves compression factors for gradient map compression during training that are even better than for inference
Hyperdrive: A Multi-Chip Systolically Scalable Binary-Weight CNN Inference Engine
Deep neural networks have achieved impressive results in computer vision and
machine learning. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art networks are extremely
compute and memory intensive which makes them unsuitable for mW-devices such as
IoT end-nodes. Aggressive quantization of these networks dramatically reduces
the computation and memory footprint. Binary-weight neural networks (BWNs)
follow this trend, pushing weight quantization to the limit. Hardware
accelerators for BWNs presented up to now have focused on core efficiency,
disregarding I/O bandwidth and system-level efficiency that are crucial for
deployment of accelerators in ultra-low power devices. We present Hyperdrive: a
BWN accelerator dramatically reducing the I/O bandwidth exploiting a novel
binary-weight streaming approach, which can be used for arbitrarily sized
convolutional neural network architecture and input resolution by exploiting
the natural scalability of the compute units both at chip-level and
system-level by arranging Hyperdrive chips systolically in a 2D mesh while
processing the entire feature map together in parallel. Hyperdrive achieves 4.3
TOp/s/W system-level efficiency (i.e., including I/Os)---3.1x higher than
state-of-the-art BWN accelerators, even if its core uses resource-intensive
FP16 arithmetic for increased robustness
CUTIE: Beyond PetaOp/s/W Ternary DNN Inference Acceleration with Better-than-Binary Energy Efficiency
We present a 3.1 POp/s/W fully digital hardware accelerator for ternary
neural networks. CUTIE, the Completely Unrolled Ternary Inference Engine,
focuses on minimizing non-computational energy and switching activity so that
dynamic power spent on storing (locally or globally) intermediate results is
minimized. This is achieved by 1) a data path architecture completely unrolled
in the feature map and filter dimensions to reduce switching activity by
favoring silencing over iterative computation and maximizing data re-use, 2)
targeting ternary neural networks which, in contrast to binary NNs, allow for
sparse weights which reduce switching activity, and 3) introducing an optimized
training method for higher sparsity of the filter weights, resulting in a
further reduction of the switching activity. Compared with state-of-the-art
accelerators, CUTIE achieves greater or equal accuracy while decreasing the
overall core inference energy cost by a factor of 4.8x-21x
A Construction Kit for Efficient Low Power Neural Network Accelerator Designs
Implementing embedded neural network processing at the edge requires
efficient hardware acceleration that couples high computational performance
with low power consumption. Driven by the rapid evolution of network
architectures and their algorithmic features, accelerator designs are
constantly updated and improved. To evaluate and compare hardware design
choices, designers can refer to a myriad of accelerator implementations in the
literature. Surveys provide an overview of these works but are often limited to
system-level and benchmark-specific performance metrics, making it difficult to
quantitatively compare the individual effect of each utilized optimization
technique. This complicates the evaluation of optimizations for new accelerator
designs, slowing-down the research progress. This work provides a survey of
neural network accelerator optimization approaches that have been used in
recent works and reports their individual effects on edge processing
performance. It presents the list of optimizations and their quantitative
effects as a construction kit, allowing to assess the design choices for each
building block separately. Reported optimizations range from up to 10'000x
memory savings to 33x energy reductions, providing chip designers an overview
of design choices for implementing efficient low power neural network
accelerators
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