A Configurable Multi-Precision CNN Computing Framework Based on Single Bit RRAM

Zhu, Zhenhua; Sun, Hanbo; Lin, Yujun; Dai, Guohao; Xia, Lixue; Han, Song; Wang, Yu; Yang, Huazhong

doi:10.1145/3316781.3317739

Cited by 68 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Power-efficiency of state-of-the-art CNNs generally improves via architectural-level techniques, such as quantization [137] and pruning [67]. These techniques do not significantly compromise CNN accuracy as they exploit the sparse nature of CNN applications [80,3,134].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These architectural techniques are applicable to any underlying hardware. There are numerous extensions of quantization [136,137] and pruning [129,36] techniques. In our experiments, we integrate typical quantization [34] and pruning [33] techniques with our proposed hardware-level undervolting technique to further improve the power-efficiency of FPGA-based CNN accelerators.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An Experimental Study of Reduced-Voltage Operation in Modern FPGAs for Neural Network Acceleration

Salami¹,

Onural

Yüksel

et al. 2020

2020 50th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)

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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%.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Experimental Study of Reduced-Voltage Operation in Modern FPGAs for Neural Network Acceleration

Salami¹,

Onural

Yüksel

et al. 2020

2020 50th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN)

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“…The study in [58] introduces an integrated CNN accelerator design with a dynamic fixed-point quantization strategy to minimize the computational loss while saving hardware resources and memory bandwidth. Another work in [59] proposes a CNN hardware design which supports configurable multi-precision computation using single bit RRAM. In this design, each layer is computed using a different number of bits, which can significantly reduce energy consumption.…”

Section: E Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Layer-Specific Optimization for Mixed Data Flow With Mixed Precision in FPGA Design for CNN-Based Object Detectors

Nguyen

Kim

Lee

2021

IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol.

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Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require both intensive computation and frequent memory access, which lead to a low processing speed and large power dissipation. Although the characteristics of the different layers in a CNN are frequently quite different, previous hardware designs have employed common optimization schemes for them. This paper proposes a layer-specific design that employs different organizations that are optimized for the different layers. The proposed design employs two layer-specific optimizations: layer-specific mixed data flow and layer-specific mixed precision. The mixed data flow aims to minimize the off-chip access while demanding a minimal on-chip memory (BRAM) resource of an FPGA device. The mixed precision quantization is to achieve both a lossless accuracy and an aggressive model compression, thereby further reducing the offchip access. A Bayesian optimization approach is used to select the best sparsity for each layer, achieving the best trade-off between the accuracy and compression. This mixing scheme allows the entire network model to be stored in BRAMs of the FPGA to aggressively reduce the off-chip access, and thereby achieves a significant performance enhancement. The model size is reduced by 22.66-28.93 times compared to that in a full-precision network with a negligible degradation of accuracy on VOC, COCO, and ImageNet datasets. Furthermore, the combination of mixed dataflow and mixed precision significantly outperforms the previous works in terms of both throughput, off-chip access, and on-chip memory requirement.

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“…Note that the 2N c cells associated with each weight parameter w i, j can be stored across multiple banks [21].…”

Section: Mvm Via a Resistive Crossbarmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Gonugondla

Patil

Shanbhag

2020

Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Computer-Aided Design

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A Configurable Multi-Precision CNN Computing Framework Based on Single Bit RRAM

Cited by 68 publications

References 12 publications

An Experimental Study of Reduced-Voltage Operation in Modern FPGAs for Neural Network Acceleration

An Experimental Study of Reduced-Voltage Operation in Modern FPGAs for Neural Network Acceleration

Layer-Specific Optimization for Mixed Data Flow With Mixed Precision in FPGA Design for CNN-Based Object Detectors

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