65,312 research outputs found
Accelerating Eulerian Fluid Simulation With Convolutional Networks
Efficient simulation of the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid flow is a long
standing problem in applied mathematics, for which state-of-the-art methods
require large compute resources. In this work, we propose a data-driven
approach that leverages the approximation power of deep-learning with the
precision of standard solvers to obtain fast and highly realistic simulations.
Our method solves the incompressible Euler equations using the standard
operator splitting method, in which a large sparse linear system with many free
parameters must be solved. We use a Convolutional Network with a highly
tailored architecture, trained using a novel unsupervised learning framework to
solve the linear system. We present real-time 2D and 3D simulations that
outperform recently proposed data-driven methods; the obtained results are
realistic and show good generalization properties.Comment: Significant revisio
CFDNet: a deep learning-based accelerator for fluid simulations
CFD is widely used in physical system design and optimization, where it is
used to predict engineering quantities of interest, such as the lift on a plane
wing or the drag on a motor vehicle. However, many systems of interest are
prohibitively expensive for design optimization, due to the expense of
evaluating CFD simulations. To render the computation tractable, reduced-order
or surrogate models are used to accelerate simulations while respecting the
convergence constraints provided by the higher-fidelity solution. This paper
introduces CFDNet -- a physical simulation and deep learning coupled framework,
for accelerating the convergence of Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes
simulations. CFDNet is designed to predict the primary physical properties of
the fluid including velocity, pressure, and eddy viscosity using a single
convolutional neural network at its core. We evaluate CFDNet on a variety of
use-cases, both extrapolative and interpolative, where test geometries are
observed/not-observed during training. Our results show that CFDNet meets the
convergence constraints of the domain-specific physics solver while
outperforming it by 1.9 - 7.4x on both steady laminar and turbulent flows.
Moreover, we demonstrate the generalization capacity of CFDNet by testing its
prediction on new geometries unseen during training. In this case, the approach
meets the CFD convergence criterion while still providing significant speedups
over traditional domain-only models.Comment: It has been accepted and almost published in the International
Conference in Supercomputing (ICS) 202
BrainFrame: A node-level heterogeneous accelerator platform for neuron simulations
Objective: The advent of High-Performance Computing (HPC) in recent years has
led to its increasing use in brain study through computational models. The
scale and complexity of such models are constantly increasing, leading to
challenging computational requirements. Even though modern HPC platforms can
often deal with such challenges, the vast diversity of the modeling field does
not permit for a single acceleration (or homogeneous) platform to effectively
address the complete array of modeling requirements. Approach: In this paper we
propose and build BrainFrame, a heterogeneous acceleration platform,
incorporating three distinct acceleration technologies, a Dataflow Engine, a
Xeon Phi and a GP-GPU. The PyNN framework is also integrated into the platform.
As a challenging proof of concept, we analyze the performance of BrainFrame on
different instances of a state-of-the-art neuron model, modeling the Inferior-
Olivary Nucleus using a biophysically-meaningful, extended Hodgkin-Huxley
representation. The model instances take into account not only the neuronal-
network dimensions but also different network-connectivity circumstances that
can drastically change application workload characteristics. Main results: The
synthetic approach of three HPC technologies demonstrated that BrainFrame is
better able to cope with the modeling diversity encountered. Our performance
analysis shows clearly that the model directly affect performance and all three
technologies are required to cope with all the model use cases.Comment: 16 pages, 18 figures, 5 table
PyCARL: A PyNN Interface for Hardware-Software Co-Simulation of Spiking Neural Network
We present PyCARL, a PyNN-based common Python programming interface for
hardware-software co-simulation of spiking neural network (SNN). Through
PyCARL, we make the following two key contributions. First, we provide an
interface of PyNN to CARLsim, a computationally-efficient, GPU-accelerated and
biophysically-detailed SNN simulator. PyCARL facilitates joint development of
machine learning models and code sharing between CARLsim and PyNN users,
promoting an integrated and larger neuromorphic community. Second, we integrate
cycle-accurate models of state-of-the-art neuromorphic hardware such as
TrueNorth, Loihi, and DynapSE in PyCARL, to accurately model hardware latencies
that delay spikes between communicating neurons and degrade performance. PyCARL
allows users to analyze and optimize the performance difference between
software-only simulation and hardware-software co-simulation of their machine
learning models. We show that system designers can also use PyCARL to perform
design-space exploration early in the product development stage, facilitating
faster time-to-deployment of neuromorphic products. We evaluate the memory
usage and simulation time of PyCARL using functionality tests, synthetic SNNs,
and realistic applications. Our results demonstrate that for large SNNs, PyCARL
does not lead to any significant overhead compared to CARLsim. We also use
PyCARL to analyze these SNNs for a state-of-the-art neuromorphic hardware and
demonstrate a significant performance deviation from software-only simulations.
PyCARL allows to evaluate and minimize such differences early during model
development.Comment: 10 pages, 25 figures. Accepted for publication at International Joint
Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 202
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
Fast Neural Network Predictions from Constrained Aerodynamics Datasets
Incorporating computational fluid dynamics in the design process of jets,
spacecraft, or gas turbine engines is often challenged by the required
computational resources and simulation time, which depend on the chosen
physics-based computational models and grid resolutions. An ongoing problem in
the field is how to simulate these systems faster but with sufficient accuracy.
While many approaches involve simplified models of the underlying physics,
others are model-free and make predictions based only on existing simulation
data. We present a novel model-free approach in which we reformulate the
simulation problem to effectively increase the size of constrained pre-computed
datasets and introduce a novel neural network architecture (called a cluster
network) with an inductive bias well-suited to highly nonlinear computational
fluid dynamics solutions. Compared to the state-of-the-art in model-based
approximations, we show that our approach is nearly as accurate, an order of
magnitude faster, and easier to apply. Furthermore, we show that our method
outperforms other model-free approaches
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