3,760 research outputs found
Towards Ultra-High Performance and Energy Efficiency of Deep Learning Systems: An Algorithm-Hardware Co-Optimization Framework
Hardware accelerations of deep learning systems have been extensively
investigated in industry and academia. The aim of this paper is to achieve
ultra-high energy efficiency and performance for hardware implementations of
deep neural networks (DNNs). An algorithm-hardware co-optimization framework is
developed, which is applicable to different DNN types, sizes, and application
scenarios. The algorithm part adopts the general block-circulant matrices to
achieve a fine-grained tradeoff between accuracy and compression ratio. It
applies to both fully-connected and convolutional layers and contains a
mathematically rigorous proof of the effectiveness of the method. The proposed
algorithm reduces computational complexity per layer from O() to O() and storage complexity from O() to O(), both for training and
inference. The hardware part consists of highly efficient Field Programmable
Gate Array (FPGA)-based implementations using effective reconfiguration, batch
processing, deep pipelining, resource re-using, and hierarchical control.
Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves at least
152X speedup and 71X energy efficiency gain compared with IBM TrueNorth
processor under the same test accuracy. It achieves at least 31X energy
efficiency gain compared with the reference FPGA-based work.Comment: 6 figures, AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 201
Hardware-Efficient Structure of the Accelerating Module for Implementation of Convolutional Neural Network Basic Operation
This paper presents a structural design of the hardware-efficient module for
implementation of convolution neural network (CNN) basic operation with reduced
implementation complexity. For this purpose we utilize some modification of the
Winograd minimal filtering method as well as computation vectorization
principles. This module calculate inner products of two consecutive segments of
the original data sequence, formed by a sliding window of length 3, with the
elements of a filter impulse response. The fully parallel structure of the
module for calculating these two inner products, based on the implementation of
a naive method of calculation, requires 6 binary multipliers and 4 binary
adders. The use of the Winograd minimal filtering method allows to construct a
module structure that requires only 4 binary multipliers and 8 binary adders.
Since a high-performance convolutional neural network can contain tens or even
hundreds of such modules, such a reduction can have a significant effect.Comment: 3 pages, 5 figure
FPGA Implementation of Convolutional Neural Networks with Fixed-Point Calculations
Neural network-based methods for image processing are becoming widely used in
practical applications. Modern neural networks are computationally expensive
and require specialized hardware, such as graphics processing units. Since such
hardware is not always available in real life applications, there is a
compelling need for the design of neural networks for mobile devices. Mobile
neural networks typically have reduced number of parameters and require a
relatively small number of arithmetic operations. However, they usually still
are executed at the software level and use floating-point calculations. The use
of mobile networks without further optimization may not provide sufficient
performance when high processing speed is required, for example, in real-time
video processing (30 frames per second). In this study, we suggest
optimizations to speed up computations in order to efficiently use already
trained neural networks on a mobile device. Specifically, we propose an
approach for speeding up neural networks by moving computation from software to
hardware and by using fixed-point calculations instead of floating-point. We
propose a number of methods for neural network architecture design to improve
the performance with fixed-point calculations. We also show an example of how
existing datasets can be modified and adapted for the recognition task in hand.
Finally, we present the design and the implementation of a floating-point gate
array-based device to solve the practical problem of real-time handwritten
digit classification from mobile camera video feed
An Experimental Study of Reduced-Voltage Operation in Modern FPGAs for Neural Network Acceleration
We empirically evaluate an undervolting technique, i.e., underscaling the
circuit supply voltage below the nominal level, to improve the power-efficiency
of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) accelerators mapped to Field Programmable
Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Undervolting below a safe voltage level can lead to timing
faults due to excessive circuit latency increase. We evaluate the
reliability-power trade-off for such accelerators. Specifically, we
experimentally study the reduced-voltage operation of multiple components of
real FPGAs, characterize the corresponding reliability behavior of CNN
accelerators, propose techniques to minimize the drawbacks of reduced-voltage
operation, and combine undervolting with architectural CNN optimization
techniques, i.e., quantization and pruning. We investigate the effect of
environmental temperature on the reliability-power trade-off of such
accelerators. We perform experiments on three identical samples of modern
Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA platforms with five state-of-the-art image classification
CNN benchmarks. This approach allows us to study the effects of our
undervolting technique for both software and hardware variability. We achieve
more than 3X power-efficiency (GOPs/W) gain via undervolting. 2.6X of this gain
is the result of eliminating the voltage guardband region, i.e., the safe
voltage region below the nominal level that is set by FPGA vendor to ensure
correct functionality in worst-case environmental and circuit conditions. 43%
of the power-efficiency gain is due to further undervolting below the
guardband, which comes at the cost of accuracy loss in the CNN accelerator. We
evaluate an effective frequency underscaling technique that prevents this
accuracy loss, and find that it reduces the power-efficiency gain from 43% to
25%.Comment: To appear at the DSN 2020 conferenc
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