In plain words: A full-stack compiler turns a neural network into a graph, then searches for the best ways to fuse operations, arrange data, and pipeline work on an FPGA chip. On two Xilinx chips it raised throughput up to 1.26 times over unoptimized versions.
Abstract · DNNVM : End-to-End Compiler Leveraging Heterogeneous Optimizations on FPGA-based CNN Accelerators
The convolutional neural network (CNN) has become a state-of-the-art method for several artificial intelligence domains in recent years. The increasingly complex CNN models are both computation-bound and I/O-bound. FPGA-based accelerators driven by custom instruction set architecture (ISA) achieve a balance between generality and efficiency, but there is much on them left to be optimized. We propose the full-stack compiler DNNVM, which is an integration of optimizers for graphs, loops and data layouts, and an assembler, a runtime supporter and a validation environment. The DNNVM works in the context of deep learning frameworks and transforms CNN models into the directed acyclic graph: XGraph. Based on XGraph, we transform the optimization challenges for both the data layout and pipeline into graph-level problems. DNNVM enumerates all potentially profitable fusion opportunities by a heuristic subgraph isomorphism algorithm to leverage pipeline and data layout optimizations, and searches for the best choice of execution strategies of the whole computing graph. On the Xilinx ZU2 @330 MHz and ZU9 @330 MHz, we achieve equivalently state-of-the-art performance on our benchmarks by naïve implementations without optimizations, and the throughput is further improved up to 1.26x by leveraging heterogeneous optimizations in DNNVM. Finally, with ZU9 @330 MHz, we achieve state-of-the-art performance for VGG and ResNet50. We achieve a throughput of 2.82 TOPs/s and an energy efficiency of 123.7 GOPs/s/W for VGG. Additionally, we achieve 1.38 TOPs/s for ResNet50 and 1.41 TOPs/s for GoogleNet.
Yu Xing, Shuang Liang, Lingzhi Sui, Xijie Jia, Jiantao Qiu, Xin Liu, Yushun Wang, Yu Wang, Yi Shan
arXiv:1902.07463 · cs.DC, cs.CV · submitted Feb 20, 2019 · updated Jul 25, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · 18 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables