Neuroverkon inferenssi digitaalisessa signaalikäsittelyssä kovien reaaliaikavaatimusten alaisuudessa

The main objective of this thesis is to investigate how neural network inference can be efficiently implemented on a digital signal processor under hard real-time constraints from the execution speed point of view. Theories on digital signal processors and software optimization as well as neural networks are discussed. A neural network model for the specific use case is designed and a digital signal processor implementation is created based on the neural network model. A neural network model for the use case is created based on the data from the Matlab simulation model. The neural network model is trained and validated using the Python programming language with the Keras package. The neural network model is implemented on the CEVA-XC4500 digital signal processor. The digital signal processor implementation is written in C++ language with the processor specific vector-processing intrinsics. The neural network model is evaluated based on the model accuracy, precision, recall and f1-score. The model performance is compared to the conventional use case implementation by calculating 3GPP specified metrics of misdetection probability, false alarm rate and bit error rate. The execution speed of the digital signal processor implementation is evaluated with the CEVA integrated development environment profiling tool and also with the Lauterbach PowerTrace profiling module attached to the real base station product. Through this thesis, an optimized CEVA-XC4500 digital signal processor implementation was created for the specific neural network architecture. The optimized implementation showed to consume 88 percent less cycles than the conventional implementation. Also, the neural network model performance fulfills the 3GPP specification requirements.Tämän diplomityön tarkoituksena on tutkia miten neuroverkon inferenssi voidaan toteuttaa tehokkaasti digitaalisella signaaliprosessorilla suoritusnopeuden näkökulmasta, kun sovelluksella on kovat reaaliaikavaatimukset. Työssä käsitellään teoriaa digitaalisista signaaliprosessoreista, ohjelmistojen optimoinnista ja neuroverkoista. Työssä kehitetään neuroverkkomalli tiettyyn käyttötapaukseen, ja mallin pohjalta luodaan toteutus digitaaliselle signaaliprosessorille. Neuroverkkomalli luodaan Matlab-simulointimallin avulla kerätystä datasta. Neuroverkkomalli opetetaan ja varmennetaan Python-ohjelmointikiellellä ja Keras-paketilla. Neuroverkkomalli toteutetaan CEVA-XC4500 digitaaliselle signaaliprosessorille. Digitaalisen signaaliprosessorin toteutus kirjoitetaan C++-ohjelmointikielellä ja prosessorikohtaisilla vektorilaskentaoperaatioilla. Neuroverkkomalli varmennetaan mallin tarkkuuden, precision-arvon, recall-arvon ja f1-arvon perusteella. Mallin suorituskykyä verrataan käyttötapauksen tavanomaiseen toteutukseen laskemalla 3GPP-spesifikaation mukaiset mittarit virhehavaintotodennäköisyys, väärien hälytysten lukumäärä ja bittivirhemäärä. Suoritusnopeus määritetään sekä CEVA-ohjelmointiympäristön profilointityökalulla että tukiasematuotteeseen kytketyllä Lauterbach PowerTrace-yksiköllä. Työn tuloksena luotiin optimoitu CEVA-XC4500 digitaalinen signaaliprosessoritoteutus valitulle neuroverkkoarkkitehtuurille. Optimoitu toteutus kulutti 88% vähemmän laskentasyklejä kuin tavanomainen toteutus. Neuroverkkomalli täytti 3GPP-spesifikaation mukaiset vaatimukset

DESIGN & IMPLEMENTATION OF A REAL-TIME, SPEAKER-INDEPENDENT, CONTINUOUS SPEECH RECOGNITION SYSTEM WITH VLIW DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURE

This thesis explores the feasibility of mapping a real-time, continuous speech recognition system onto a multi-core Digital Signal Processor architecture. While a pure hardware solution is capable of implementing the entire recognition process in real-time, the design process can be lengthy and inflexible to changes. However, a low-end embedded processor such as ARM7 is insufficient to execute in real-time. As a result, a more flexible and powerful DSP solution with Texas Instruments¡¦ C6713 multi-core DSP is used to exploit the instruction level parallelism within the speech recognition process. By exploiting the parallelism using 7 optimization techniques, the performance of the recognition process can be real-time on a 300 MHz DSP for a 1000 word vocabulary. At its core, continuous speech recognition is essentially a matching problem. The recognition process can be divided into four major phases: Feature Extraction, Acoustic Modeling, Phone Modeling and Word Modeling. Each phase is analyzed in detail to identify performance issues. In short, the major issues are its massive computations and large memory bandwidth. After applying various optimizations, the overall computational performance has improved from about 15 times slower than real-time to 1.6 times faster than real-time with the hardware. Through utilization of Direct Memory Access and larger cache memory, the memory bandwidth problem can be solved. The conclusion is that a multi-core DSP running at 300 MHz would be sufficient to implement a 1000 word Command & Control type application using the optimization techniques described in this thesis

Automatic Design of Efficient Application-centric Architectures.

As the market for embedded devices continues to grow, the demand for high performance, low cost, and low power computation grows as well. Many embedded applications perform computationally intensive tasks such as processing streaming video or audio, wireless communication, or speech recognition and must be implemented within tight power budgets. Typically, general purpose processors are not able to meet these performance and power requirements. Custom hardware in the form of loop accelerators are often used to execute the compute-intensive portions of these applications because they can achieve significantly higher levels of performance and power efficiency. Automated hardware synthesis from high level specifications is a key technology used in designing these accelerators, because the resulting hardware is correct by construction, easing verification and greatly decreasing time-to-market in the quickly evolving embedded domain. In this dissertation, a compiler-directed approach is used to design a loop accelerator from a C specification and a throughput requirement. The compiler analyzes the loop and generates a virtual architecture containing sufficient resources to sustain the required throughput. Next, a software pipelining scheduler maps the operations in the loop to the virtual architecture. Finally, the accelerator datapath is derived from the resulting schedule. In this dissertation, synthesis of different types of loop accelerators is investigated. First, the system for synthesizing single loop accelerators is detailed. In particular, a scheduler is presented that is aware of the effects of its decisions on the resulting hardware, and attempts to minimize hardware cost. Second, synthesis of multifunction loop accelerators, or accelerators capable of executing multiple loops, is presented. Such accelerators exploit coarse-grained hardware sharing across loops in order to reduce overall cost. Finally, synthesis of post-programmable accelerators is presented, allowing changes to be made to the software after an accelerator has been created. The tradeoffs between the flexibility, cost, and energy efficiency of these different types of accelerators are investigated. Automatically synthesized loop accelerators are capable of achieving order-of-magnitude gains in performance, area efficiency, and power efficiency over processors, and programmable accelerators allow software changes while maintaining highly efficient levels of computation.Ph.D.Computer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61644/1/fank_1.pd

Cooperative Data and Computation Partitioning for Decentralized Architectures.

Scalability of future wide-issue processor designs is severely hampered by the use of centralized resources such as register files, memories and interconnect networks. While the use of centralized resources eases both hardware design and compiler code generation efforts, they can become performance bottlenecks as access latencies increase with larger designs. The natural solution to this problem is to adapt the architecture to use smaller, decentralized resources. Decentralized architectures use smaller, faster components and exploit distributed instruction-level parallelism across the resources. A multicluster architecture is an example of such a decentralized processor, where subsets of smaller register files, functional units, and memories are grouped together in a tightly coupled unit, forming a cluster. These clusters can then be replicated and connected together to form a scalable, high-performance architecture. The main difficulty with decentralized architectures resides in compiler code generation. In a centralized Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processor, the compiler must statically schedule each operation to both a functional unit and a time slot for execution. In contrast, for a decentralized multicluster VLIW, the compiler must consider the additional effects of cluster assignment, recognizing that communication between clusters will result in a delay penalty. In addition, if the multicluster processor also has partitioned data memories, the compiler has the additional task of assigning data objects to their respective memories. Each decision, of cluster, functional unit, memory, and time slot, are highly interrelated and can have dramatic effects on the best choice for every other decision. This dissertation addresses the issues of extracting and exploiting inherent parallelism across decentralized resources through compiler analysis and code generation techniques. First, a static analysis technique to partition data objects is presented, which maps data objects to decentralized scratchpad memories. Second, an alternative profile-guided technique for memory partitioning is presented which can effectively map data access operations onto distributed caches. Finally, a detailed, resource-aware partitioning algorithm is presented which can effectively split computation operations of an application across a set of processing elements. These partitioners work in tandem to create a high-performance partition assignment of both memory and computation operations for decentralized multicluster or multicore processors.Ph.D.Computer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57649/2/mchu_1.pd

Dynamically reconfigurable architecture for embedded computer vision systems

The objective of this research work is to design, develop and implement a new architecture which integrates on the same chip all the processing levels of a complete Computer Vision system, so that the execution is efficient without compromising the power consumption while keeping a reduced cost. For this purpose, an analysis and classification of different mathematical operations and algorithms commonly used in Computer Vision are carried out, as well as a in-depth review of the image processing capabilities of current-generation hardware devices. This permits to determine the requirements and the key aspects for an efficient architecture. A representative set of algorithms is employed as benchmark to evaluate the proposed architecture, which is implemented on an FPGA-based system-on-chip. Finally, the prototype is compared to other related approaches in order to determine its advantages and weaknesses