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

Internationalisation of Innovation: Why Chip Design Moving to Asia

This paper will appear in International Journal of Innovation Management, special issue in honor of Keith Pavitt, (Peter Augsdoerfer, Jonathan Sapsed, and James Utterback, guest editors), forthcoming. Among Keith Pavitt's many contributions to the study of innovation is the proposition that physical proximity is advantageous for innovative activities that involve highly complex technological knowledge But chip design, a process that creates the greatest value in the electronics industry and that requires highly complex knowledge, is experiencing a massive dispersion to leading Asian electronics exporting countries. To explain why chip design is moving to Asia, the paper draws on interviews with 60 companies and 15 research institutions that are doing leading-edge chip design in Asia. I demonstrate that "pull" and "policy" factors explain what attracts design to particular locations. But to get to the root causes that shift the balance in favor of geographical decentralization, I examine "push" factors, i.e. changes in design methodology ("system-on-chip design") and organization ("vertical specialization" within global design networks). The resultant increase in knowledge mobility explains why chip design - that, in Pavitt's framework is not supposed to move - is moving from the traditional centers to a few new specialized design clusters in Asia. A completely revised and updated version has been published as: " Complexity and Internationalisation of Innovation: Why is Chip Design Moving to Asia?," in International Journal of Innovation Management, special issue in honour of Keith Pavitt, Vol. 9,1: 47-73.

Identifying and improving reusability based on coupling patterns

Open Source Software (OSS) communities have not yet taken full advantage of reuse mechanisms. Typically many OSS projects which share the same application domain and topic, duplicate effort and code, without fully leveraging the vast amounts of available code. This study proposes the empirical evaluation of source code folders of OSS projects in order to determine their actual internal reuse and their potential as shareable, fine-grained and externally reusable software components by future projects. This paper empirically analyzes four OSS systems, identifies which components (in the form of folders) are currently being reused internally and studies their coupling characteristics. Stable components (i.e., those which act as service providers rather than service consumers) are shown to be more likely to be reusable. As a means of supporting replication of these successful instances of OSS reuse, source folders with similar patterns are extracted from the studied systems, and identified as externally reusable components

Reusable Software Components for Robots Using Fuzzy Abstractions

Mobile robots today, while varying greatly in design, often have a large number of similarities in terms of their tasks and goals. Navigation, obstacle avoidance, and vision are all examples. In turn, robots of similar design, but with varying configurations, should be able to share the bulk of their controlling software. Any changes required should be minimal and ideally only to specify new hardware configurations. However, it is difficult to achieve such flexibility, mainly due to the enormous variety of robot hardware available and the huge number of possible configurations. Monolithic controllers that can handle such variety are impossible to build. This paper will investigate these portability problems, as well as techniques to manage common abstractions for user-designed components. The challenge is in creating new methods for robot software to support a diverse variety of robots, while also being easily upgraded and extended. These methods can then provide new ways to support the operational and functional reuse of the same high-level components across a variety of robots

Open source ERP for SMEs.

For the last decade or so, the biggest category of the IT investment has unarguably been Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Most of the bigger corporations in the developed countries have implemented ERP systems with an aim to achieving competitive edge in their respective business areas. Now that the top end of the ERP market has been saturated, the main interest has moved to non-commercial sectors such as universities and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These organisations have not been able benefit directly from the ERP revolution because an ERP implementation requires huge resources and entails high risks. Over the same period, the concept of Open Source Software (OSS) has been enthusiastically adopted by the software engineering community. OSS has excelled in many systems software domains, for example, operating systems with Linux and web servers with Apache. Having observed these successes, the software industry has been showing interest in application domains such as enterprise information systems, more specifically ERP systems, as the next OSS candidates. In this paper, we outline the challenges as well as opportunities of OSS ERP development

An agent-based fuzzy cognitive map approach to the strategic marketing planning for industrial firms

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Industrial Marketing Management. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2013 Elsevier B.V.Industrial marketing planning is a typical example of an unstructured decision making problem due to the large number of variables to consider and the uncertainty imposed on those variables. Although abundant studies identified barriers and facilitators of effective industrial marketing planning in practice, the literature still lacks practical tools and methods that marketing managers can use for the task. This paper applies fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) to industrial marketing planning. In particular, agent based inference method is proposed to overcome dynamic relationships, time lags, and reusability issues of FCM evaluation. MACOM simulator also is developed to help marketing managers conduct what-if scenarios to see the impacts of possible changes on the variables defined in an FCM that represents industrial marketing planning problem. The simulator is applied to an industrial marketing planning problem for a global software service company in South Korea. This study has practical implication as it supports marketing managers for industrial marketing planning that has large number of variables and their cause–effect relationships. It also contributes to FCM theory by providing an agent based method for the inference of FCM. Finally, MACOM also provides academics in the industrial marketing management discipline with a tool for developing and pre-verifying a conceptual model based on qualitative knowledge of marketing practitioners.Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Korea