58 research outputs found
GraphR: Accelerating Graph Processing Using ReRAM
This paper presents GRAPHR, the first ReRAM-based graph processing
accelerator. GRAPHR follows the principle of near-data processing and explores
the opportunity of performing massive parallel analog operations with low
hardware and energy cost. The analog computation is suit- able for graph
processing because: 1) The algorithms are iterative and could inherently
tolerate the imprecision; 2) Both probability calculation (e.g., PageRank and
Collaborative Filtering) and typical graph algorithms involving integers (e.g.,
BFS/SSSP) are resilient to errors. The key insight of GRAPHR is that if a
vertex program of a graph algorithm can be expressed in sparse matrix vector
multiplication (SpMV), it can be efficiently performed by ReRAM crossbar. We
show that this assumption is generally true for a large set of graph
algorithms. GRAPHR is a novel accelerator architecture consisting of two
components: memory ReRAM and graph engine (GE). The core graph computations are
performed in sparse matrix format in GEs (ReRAM crossbars). The
vector/matrix-based graph computation is not new, but ReRAM offers the unique
opportunity to realize the massive parallelism with unprecedented energy
efficiency and low hardware cost. With small subgraphs processed by GEs, the
gain of performing parallel operations overshadows the wastes due to sparsity.
The experiment results show that GRAPHR achieves a 16.01x (up to 132.67x)
speedup and a 33.82x energy saving on geometric mean compared to a CPU baseline
system. Com- pared to GPU, GRAPHR achieves 1.69x to 2.19x speedup and consumes
4.77x to 8.91x less energy. GRAPHR gains a speedup of 1.16x to 4.12x, and is
3.67x to 10.96x more energy efficiency compared to PIM-based architecture.Comment: Accepted to HPCA 201
Low-Cost Floating-Point Processing in ReRAM for Scientific Computing
We propose ReFloat, a principled approach for low-cost floating-point
processing in ReRAM. The exponent offsets based on a base are stored by a
flexible and fine-grained floating-point number representation. The key
motivation is that, while the number of exponent bits must be reduced due to
the exponential relation to the computation latency and hardware cost, the
convergence still requires sufficient accuracy for exponents. Our design
reconciles the conflicting goals by storing the exponent offsets from a common
base among matrix values in a block, which is the granularity of computation in
ReRAM. Due to the value locality, the differences among the exponents in a
block are small, thus the offsets require much less number of bits to represent
exponents. In essence, ReFloat enables the principled local fine-tuning of
floating-point representation. Based on the idea, we define a flexible ReFloat
format that specifies matrix block size, and the number of bits for exponent
and fraction. To determine the base for each block, we propose an optimization
method that minimizes the difference between the exponents of the original
matrix block and the converted block. We develop the conversion scheme from
default double-precision floating-point format to ReFloat format, the
computation procedure, and the low-cost floating-point processing architecture
in ReRAM
HyPar: Towards Hybrid Parallelism for Deep Learning Accelerator Array
With the rise of artificial intelligence in recent years, Deep Neural
Networks (DNNs) have been widely used in many domains. To achieve high
performance and energy efficiency, hardware acceleration (especially inference)
of DNNs is intensively studied both in academia and industry. However, we still
face two challenges: large DNN models and datasets, which incur frequent
off-chip memory accesses; and the training of DNNs, which is not well-explored
in recent accelerator designs. To truly provide high throughput and energy
efficient acceleration for the training of deep and large models, we inevitably
need to use multiple accelerators to explore the coarse-grain parallelism,
compared to the fine-grain parallelism inside a layer considered in most of the
existing architectures. It poses the key research question to seek the best
organization of computation and dataflow among accelerators. In this paper, we
propose a solution HyPar to determine layer-wise parallelism for deep neural
network training with an array of DNN accelerators. HyPar partitions the
feature map tensors (input and output), the kernel tensors, the gradient
tensors, and the error tensors for the DNN accelerators. A partition
constitutes the choice of parallelism for weighted layers. The optimization
target is to search a partition that minimizes the total communication during
training a complete DNN. To solve this problem, we propose a communication
model to explain the source and amount of communications. Then, we use a
hierarchical layer-wise dynamic programming method to search for the partition
for each layer.Comment: To appear in the 2019 25th International Symposium on
High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA 2019
Axitinib targets cardiac fibrosis in pressure overload-induced heart failure through VEGFA-KDR pathway
BackgroundThere are no specific clinical medications that target cardiac fibrosis in heart failure (HF). Recent studies have shown that tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) may benefit fibrosis in various organs. However, there is limited research on their application in cardiac fibrosis. Axitinib, an FDA-approved tyrosine kinase inhibitor, was used to evaluate its effects on cardiac fibrosis and function in pressure overload-induced heart failure.MethodsTo build a pharmacological network, the pharmacological targets of axitinib were first retrieved from databases and coupled with key heart failure gene molecules for analysis and prediction. To validate the results outlined above, 8-week-old male C57BL/6 J mice were orally administrated of axitinib (30 mg/kg) daily for 8 weeks after Transverse Aortic Constriction (TAC) surgery. Mouse cardiomyocytes and cardiac fibroblasts were used as cell lines to test the function and mechanism of axitinib.ResultsWe found that the pharmacological targets of axitinib could form a pharmacological network with key genes involved in heart failure. The VEGFA-KDR pathway was found to be closely related to the differential gene expression of human heart-derived primary cardiomyocyte cell lines treated with axitinib, based on analysis of the publicly available dataset. The outcomes of animal experiments demonstrated that axitinib therapy greatly reduced cardiac fibrosis and improved TAC-induced cardiac dysfunction. Further research has shown that the expression of transforming growth factor-β(TGF-β) and other fibrosis genes was significantly reduced in vivo and in vitro.ConclusionOur study provides evidence for the repurposing of axitinib to combat cardiac fibrosis, and offers new insights into the treatment of patients with HF
Light and Heavy Fractions of Soil Organic Matter in Response to Climate Warming and Increased Precipitation in a Temperate Steppe
Soil is one of the most important carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pools and plays a crucial role in ecosystem C and N cycling. Climate change profoundly affects soil C and N storage via changing C and N inputs and outputs. However, the influences of climate warming and changing precipitation regime on labile and recalcitrant fractions of soil organic C and N remain unclear. Here, we investigated soil labile and recalcitrant C and N under 6 years' treatments of experimental warming and increased precipitation in a temperate steppe in Northern China. We measured soil light fraction C (LFC) and N (LFN), microbial biomass C (MBC) and N (MBN), dissolved organic C (DOC) and heavy fraction C (HFC) and N (HFN). The results showed that increased precipitation significantly stimulated soil LFC and LFN by 16.1% and 18.5%, respectively, and increased LFC∶HFC ratio and LFN∶HFN ratio, suggesting that increased precipitation transferred more soil organic carbon into the quick-decayed carbon pool. Experimental warming reduced soil labile C (LFC, MBC, and DOC). In contrast, soil heavy fraction C and N, and total C and N were not significantly impacted by increased precipitation or warming. Soil labile C significantly correlated with gross ecosystem productivity, ecosystem respiration and soil respiration, but not with soil moisture and temperature, suggesting that biotic processes rather than abiotic factors determine variations in soil labile C. Our results indicate that certain soil carbon fraction is sensitive to climate change in the temperate steppe, which may in turn impact ecosystem carbon fluxes in response and feedback to climate change
A Research of Simplified Method in Boiler Efficiency Test
AbstractIt is needed to make ultimate analysis of coal when testing boiler efficiency by traditional method. However, it is so costly and so long that it is impossible to test boiler efficiency frequently. However, it is much easier to make proximate analysis of coal, and most enterprise may operate. In this paper, a mathematics model has been established based on proximate analysis so as to replace ultimate analysis of coal in boiler efficiency testing. Theoretical air requirement, heat loss due to exhaust gas, and heat loss due to unburned gases were compared by this new model. Errors are no more than 5%, and it shows that the method is feasible and valid
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