918 research outputs found
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
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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