55 research outputs found
Toolflows for Mapping Convolutional Neural Networks on FPGAs: A Survey and Future Directions
In the past decade, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated
state-of-the-art performance in various Artificial Intelligence tasks. To
accelerate the experimentation and development of CNNs, several software
frameworks have been released, primarily targeting power-hungry CPUs and GPUs.
In this context, reconfigurable hardware in the form of FPGAs constitutes a
potential alternative platform that can be integrated in the existing deep
learning ecosystem to provide a tunable balance between performance, power
consumption and programmability. In this paper, a survey of the existing
CNN-to-FPGA toolflows is presented, comprising a comparative study of their key
characteristics which include the supported applications, architectural
choices, design space exploration methods and achieved performance. Moreover,
major challenges and objectives introduced by the latest trends in CNN
algorithmic research are identified and presented. Finally, a uniform
evaluation methodology is proposed, aiming at the comprehensive, complete and
in-depth evaluation of CNN-to-FPGA toolflows.Comment: Accepted for publication at the ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) journal,
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HPIPE: Heterogeneous Layer-Pipelined and Sparse-Aware CNN Inference for FPGAs
We present both a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) accelerator
architecture and a network compiler for FPGAs that outperforms all prior work.
Instead of having generic processing elements that together process one layer
at a time, our network compiler statically partitions available device
resources and builds custom-tailored hardware for each layer of a CNN. By
building hardware for each layer we can pack our controllers into fewer lookup
tables and use dedicated routing. These efficiencies enable our accelerator to
utilize 2x the DSPs and operate at more than 2x the frequency of prior work on
sparse CNN acceleration on FPGAs. We evaluate the performance of our
architecture on both sparse Resnet-50 and dense MobileNet Imagenet classifiers
on a Stratix 10 2800 FPGA. We find that the sparse Resnet-50 model has
throughput at a batch size of 1 of 4550 images/s, which is nearly 4x the
throughput of NVIDIA's fastest machine learning targeted GPU, the V100, and
outperforms all prior work on FPGAs.Comment: 8 Pages, 11 Figure
A Construction Kit for Efficient Low Power Neural Network Accelerator Designs
Implementing embedded neural network processing at the edge requires
efficient hardware acceleration that couples high computational performance
with low power consumption. Driven by the rapid evolution of network
architectures and their algorithmic features, accelerator designs are
constantly updated and improved. To evaluate and compare hardware design
choices, designers can refer to a myriad of accelerator implementations in the
literature. Surveys provide an overview of these works but are often limited to
system-level and benchmark-specific performance metrics, making it difficult to
quantitatively compare the individual effect of each utilized optimization
technique. This complicates the evaluation of optimizations for new accelerator
designs, slowing-down the research progress. This work provides a survey of
neural network accelerator optimization approaches that have been used in
recent works and reports their individual effects on edge processing
performance. It presents the list of optimizations and their quantitative
effects as a construction kit, allowing to assess the design choices for each
building block separately. Reported optimizations range from up to 10'000x
memory savings to 33x energy reductions, providing chip designers an overview
of design choices for implementing efficient low power neural network
accelerators
Hyperdrive: A Multi-Chip Systolically Scalable Binary-Weight CNN Inference Engine
Deep neural networks have achieved impressive results in computer vision and
machine learning. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art networks are extremely
compute and memory intensive which makes them unsuitable for mW-devices such as
IoT end-nodes. Aggressive quantization of these networks dramatically reduces
the computation and memory footprint. Binary-weight neural networks (BWNs)
follow this trend, pushing weight quantization to the limit. Hardware
accelerators for BWNs presented up to now have focused on core efficiency,
disregarding I/O bandwidth and system-level efficiency that are crucial for
deployment of accelerators in ultra-low power devices. We present Hyperdrive: a
BWN accelerator dramatically reducing the I/O bandwidth exploiting a novel
binary-weight streaming approach, which can be used for arbitrarily sized
convolutional neural network architecture and input resolution by exploiting
the natural scalability of the compute units both at chip-level and
system-level by arranging Hyperdrive chips systolically in a 2D mesh while
processing the entire feature map together in parallel. Hyperdrive achieves 4.3
TOp/s/W system-level efficiency (i.e., including I/Os)---3.1x higher than
state-of-the-art BWN accelerators, even if its core uses resource-intensive
FP16 arithmetic for increased robustness
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