7,578 research outputs found
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
Limits to Modularity: A Review of the Literature and Evidence from Chip Design
This working paper has been prepared as part of the East-West Center's research project on Globalization of Knowledge Work: Why is Chip Design Moving to Asia. In this paper, Dieter assesses what we know about the limits to modularity and their impact on firm organization and industry structure. He focuses on evidence form chip design, drawing on interview on 2002 and 2003 with a sample of 60 companies and 15 research institutions that are involved in chip design in the US, Taiwan, Korea, China and Malaysia. It is summarized "stylized" propositions of the modularity literature that are well-established, as well as predictions that are controversial. In addition, important limits to modularity and relevant management responses were reviewed.
Deep Learning Techniques for Music Generation -- A Survey
This paper is a survey and an analysis of different ways of using deep
learning (deep artificial neural networks) to generate musical content. We
propose a methodology based on five dimensions for our analysis:
Objective - What musical content is to be generated? Examples are: melody,
polyphony, accompaniment or counterpoint. - For what destination and for what
use? To be performed by a human(s) (in the case of a musical score), or by a
machine (in the case of an audio file).
Representation - What are the concepts to be manipulated? Examples are:
waveform, spectrogram, note, chord, meter and beat. - What format is to be
used? Examples are: MIDI, piano roll or text. - How will the representation be
encoded? Examples are: scalar, one-hot or many-hot.
Architecture - What type(s) of deep neural network is (are) to be used?
Examples are: feedforward network, recurrent network, autoencoder or generative
adversarial networks.
Challenge - What are the limitations and open challenges? Examples are:
variability, interactivity and creativity.
Strategy - How do we model and control the process of generation? Examples
are: single-step feedforward, iterative feedforward, sampling or input
manipulation.
For each dimension, we conduct a comparative analysis of various models and
techniques and we propose some tentative multidimensional typology. This
typology is bottom-up, based on the analysis of many existing deep-learning
based systems for music generation selected from the relevant literature. These
systems are described and are used to exemplify the various choices of
objective, representation, architecture, challenge and strategy. The last
section includes some discussion and some prospects.Comment: 209 pages. This paper is a simplified version of the book: J.-P.
Briot, G. Hadjeres and F.-D. Pachet, Deep Learning Techniques for Music
Generation, Computational Synthesis and Creative Systems, Springer, 201
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