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, 201

Shadow Ghost Encounter

Ok, so one day I was a senior in highschool, and I was over at my friends house, and we were in her basement, and so she has like a movie theater type of thing and so there is a screen, and there’s no windows or anything ok? So there\u27s this screen and then in the back room there’s like the DVD player and all that, and so we’re watching, uh, hairspray, of course, and we are like halfway through and then we see this, shadow, in the corner, and we look over and we were like wow that was weird, and then we just keep going watching the movie, and then a little while later it goes across the screen, over into the kitchen area, and then, we’re like oh shit and we were hiding behind all the blankets and all of that, and then we started hearing like all of these pots and pans and everything, and we’re like holy shit and then we see it move one more time into the back over by the DVD player, and then like the movie starts getting louder and louder and louder, and that\u27s when we just like booked it upstairs. So yeah that\u27s my story

Lone Peak Drill Initiation

Okay, when I was a freshman in highschool, I, auditioned for the drill team, and I made it, and each year, like we did like a team retreat, and that year we went up to Bear Lake to our coach’s cabin, and, I think it was like the first night we were there, like all the returners and like the captains were like oh we have to do this initiation thing. And, um, so all of like the new people that made the team had to like sit upstairs, and they would call us downstairs like one by one, and so, when I got down there all of like the returners were like sitting in a circle and I had to go sit in the middle. And like they put a blanket on top of me, and then they did this whole like, story kind of, thing, about how you are in a desert and you are hot and you have to take, like, take stuff off of you, to stay alive, and so you would like sit under there and you would like slowly take off one like, thing at a time, and then, um, finally you discovered that you could take off the blanket, cause that is something that is on you, you could get sit on the outside with like all of the returners and then the next person could come down, and they would do the same thing. And ya, and also the next year I was on drill and we had to go to like the same, retreat thing, and we were not allowed to do invitations because the school board banned them from happening

Halloween Cat

Abby: So I began Halloween Cat , I don’t even remember, since I have been a kid, like since I\u27ve been able to carve pumpkins and be involved in it. Me: Where did you learn Halloween Cat from? Abby: My parents, we would do it with them and we would do it with my grandparents. Me: Which side of the family were these grandparents from? A: Oh DEFINITELY from my dad’s side. Me: And where did your parents learn it from? A: So my dads, parents, did it while they were growing up and then, he has done it is whole life and then he has done it with us. Me: What exactly is Halloween Cat? A: Halloween cat is a song that we will sing, and so, like, the tradition is that we will carve our pumpkins and then after you carve them, you, like, put candles in them so they are all lit up, then you turn off the lights in the house and then you hold your pumpkins and walk around into each room singing: “Halloween Cat, Halloween Cat, why do you hiss and meow like that, neither here nor there will get a scare, now SCAT , ya Halloween Cat!” and it gets rid of all the bad spirits in that room. Me: Do you still do this every year? A: Yeah, we would always do this when I lived in Connecticut, and then we did it, I\u27ve done it every year until I moved to college. Me: Was there anymore to the tradition, like you would eat dinner after every time, or anything else like that? A: No, that was the only part of the tradition, then after, you would just kinda chill there was nothing specific that we did. Me: Ok I think that\u27s everything thank you for your time. A: You’re welcome

Greek New Years Day

Every year on New Year\u27s day, after I sleep in late from staying up late the night before to see the ball drop, I go over to my grandparents house on my dad’s side (they live right next door so it is very convenient) and have dinner and cut what is called the “vasilopita”. The vasilopita is a sweet bread that we buy some years and make others. It is a circular loaf that is pretty good sized. What’s interesting about this bread though is that it has a quarter baked into it. The quarter is supposed to symbolize good luck for the year and whoever gets the piece of bread with it in it then they get all of the luck. After we eat a dinner of both greek and non greek food and are all super full we bring out the vasilopita. Then we have to head of the house, who in this case is my grandpa, cut the bread. There is a specific order that you are supposed to cut it. You cut the first one for God and put it on a plate, the next one is for the Virgin Mary, then the next is for the church I believe. Then you start with the the oldest sibling, which is my Uncle Mark, and his family. Then the second oldest and there family, then finally the youngest, who is my dad, and our family. My grandpa eventually makes a slice for everyone that is there and we sit down and eat the bread and praise the person who got the quarter. We then usually talk and have fun just for an hour or so more then everyone disperses and we do it all again next year

Approximate FPGA-based LSTMs under Computation Time Constraints

Recurrent Neural Networks and in particular Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks have demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracy in several emerging Artificial Intelligence tasks. However, the models are becoming increasingly demanding in terms of computational and memory load. Emerging latency-sensitive applications including mobile robots and autonomous vehicles often operate under stringent computation time constraints. In this paper, we address the challenge of deploying computationally demanding LSTMs at a constrained time budget by introducing an approximate computing scheme that combines iterative low-rank compression and pruning, along with a novel FPGA-based LSTM architecture. Combined in an end-to-end framework, the approximation method's parameters are optimised and the architecture is configured to address the problem of high-performance LSTM execution in time-constrained applications. Quantitative evaluation on a real-life image captioning application indicates that the proposed methods required up to 6.5x less time to achieve the same application-level accuracy compared to a baseline method, while achieving an average of 25x higher accuracy under the same computation time constraints.Comment: Accepted at the 14th International Symposium in Applied Reconfigurable Computing (ARC) 201

The Wobble, Top Golf initiation

I worked at Top Golf, for six whole days, and, um, one my first day of training the first thing they taught us, was that, anytime the wobble, come on, the speakers while they are playing music, um, you gotta stop what you are doing, and do the dance that they teach you, the wobble. So, like, if you\u27re on shift and that song comes on, you gotta stop whatever you are doing and you just gotta dance. And uh, I don’t currently work there anymore. Me: “What was the dance.” Oh, ok so the dance, it’s like, it’s the same one that you do for country swing, so for the wobble what you’re going to do is, you’re just gonna stand up, you\u27re just gonna lean back a little bit and you\u27re just gonna like shake your shoulders back, ya know just let your arms go, and then you are gonna do that forward at a different part of the song, and then, you’re gonna like, pretend that you are just rolling some dough up on left and up on the right, and then you just gonna do some other steps, but like, it’s pretty funny not gonna lie. It was the like initiation it was, like, the first thing that they ever taught us. So yeah