4,497 research outputs found
Optimizing Memory Efficiency for Convolution Kernels on Kepler GPUs
Convolution is a fundamental operation in many applications, such as computer
vision, natural language processing, image processing, etc. Recent successes of
convolutional neural networks in various deep learning applications put even
higher demand on fast convolution. The high computation throughput and memory
bandwidth of graphics processing units (GPUs) make GPUs a natural choice for
accelerating convolution operations. However, maximally exploiting the
available memory bandwidth of GPUs for convolution is a challenging task. This
paper introduces a general model to address the mismatch between the memory
bank width of GPUs and computation data width of threads. Based on this model,
we develop two convolution kernels, one for the general case and the other for
a special case with one input channel. By carefully optimizing memory access
patterns and computation patterns, we design a communication-optimized kernel
for the special case and a communication-reduced kernel for the general case.
Experimental data based on implementations on Kepler GPUs show that our kernels
achieve 5.16X and 35.5% average performance improvement over the latest cuDNN
library, for the special case and the general case, respectively
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
vDNN: Virtualized Deep Neural Networks for Scalable, Memory-Efficient Neural Network Design
The most widely used machine learning frameworks require users to carefully
tune their memory usage so that the deep neural network (DNN) fits into the
DRAM capacity of a GPU. This restriction hampers a researcher's flexibility to
study different machine learning algorithms, forcing them to either use a less
desirable network architecture or parallelize the processing across multiple
GPUs. We propose a runtime memory manager that virtualizes the memory usage of
DNNs such that both GPU and CPU memory can simultaneously be utilized for
training larger DNNs. Our virtualized DNN (vDNN) reduces the average GPU memory
usage of AlexNet by up to 89%, OverFeat by 91%, and GoogLeNet by 95%, a
significant reduction in memory requirements of DNNs. Similar experiments on
VGG-16, one of the deepest and memory hungry DNNs to date, demonstrate the
memory-efficiency of our proposal. vDNN enables VGG-16 with batch size 256
(requiring 28 GB of memory) to be trained on a single NVIDIA Titan X GPU card
containing 12 GB of memory, with 18% performance loss compared to a
hypothetical, oracular GPU with enough memory to hold the entire DNN.Comment: Published as a conference paper at the 49th IEEE/ACM International
Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-49), 201
Deep Learning in the Automotive Industry: Applications and Tools
Deep Learning refers to a set of machine learning techniques that utilize
neural networks with many hidden layers for tasks, such as image
classification, speech recognition, language understanding. Deep learning has
been proven to be very effective in these domains and is pervasively used by
many Internet services. In this paper, we describe different automotive uses
cases for deep learning in particular in the domain of computer vision. We
surveys the current state-of-the-art in libraries, tools and infrastructures
(e.\,g.\ GPUs and clouds) for implementing, training and deploying deep neural
networks. We particularly focus on convolutional neural networks and computer
vision use cases, such as the visual inspection process in manufacturing plants
and the analysis of social media data. To train neural networks, curated and
labeled datasets are essential. In particular, both the availability and scope
of such datasets is typically very limited. A main contribution of this paper
is the creation of an automotive dataset, that allows us to learn and
automatically recognize different vehicle properties. We describe an end-to-end
deep learning application utilizing a mobile app for data collection and
process support, and an Amazon-based cloud backend for storage and training.
For training we evaluate the use of cloud and on-premises infrastructures
(including multiple GPUs) in conjunction with different neural network
architectures and frameworks. We assess both the training times as well as the
accuracy of the classifier. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the
trained classifier in a real world setting during manufacturing process.Comment: 10 page
Workload-aware Automatic Parallelization for Multi-GPU DNN Training
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have emerged as successful solutions for variety
of artificial intelligence applications, but their very large and deep models
impose high computational requirements during training. Multi-GPU
parallelization is a popular option to accelerate demanding computations in DNN
training, but most state-of-the-art multi-GPU deep learning frameworks not only
require users to have an in-depth understanding of the implementation of the
frameworks themselves, but also apply parallelization in a straight-forward way
without optimizing GPU utilization. In this work, we propose a workload-aware
auto-parallelization framework (WAP) for DNN training, where the work is
automatically distributed to multiple GPUs based on the workload
characteristics. We evaluate WAP using TensorFlow with popular DNN benchmarks
(AlexNet and VGG-16), and show competitive training throughput compared with
the state-of-the-art frameworks, and also demonstrate that WAP automatically
optimizes GPU assignment based on the workload's compute requirements, thereby
improving energy efficiency.Comment: This paper is accepted in ICASSP201
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