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Glow: Graph Lowering Compiler Techniques for Neural Networks (arxiv.org)
2 points by godelmachine on May 7, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Glow splits a neural network's graph into two stages: one for cleanup, one for low-level instructions that plan memory and cut needless copies. It also breaks many operators into a few math blocks, so each new chip only needs those few, not every operator.

Abstract

This paper presents the design of Glow, a machine learning compiler for heterogeneous hardware. It is a pragmatic approach to compilation that enables the generation of highly optimized code for multiple targets. Glow lowers the traditional neural network dataflow graph into a two-phase strongly-typed intermediate representation. The high-level intermediate representation allows the optimizer to perform domain-specific optimizations. The lower-level instruction-based address-only intermediate representation allows the compiler to perform memory-related optimizations, such as instruction scheduling, static memory allocation and copy elimination. At the lowest level, the optimizer performs machine-specific code generation to take advantage of specialized hardware features. Glow features a lowering phase which enables the compiler to support a high number of input operators as well as a large number of hardware targets by eliminating the need to implement all operators on all targets. The lowering phase is designed to reduce the input space and allow new hardware backends to focus on a small number of linear algebra primitives.

Nadav Rotem, Jordan Fix, Saleem Abdulrasool, Garret Catron, Summer Deng, Roman Dzhabarov, Nick Gibson, James Hegeman, Meghan Lele, Roman Levenstein, Jack Montgomery, Bert Maher, et al.
arXiv:1805.00907 · cs.PL · submitted May 2, 2018 · updated Apr 3, 2019
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