In plain words: Built a chip that chops recurrent-network math into small tiles and pipelines them, reconfiguring itself to fit whatever network size a task like speech recognition needs. It ran 2 times faster than the best custom chip design while using less energy.
Abstract · SHARP: An Adaptable, Energy-Efficient Accelerator for Recurrent Neural Network
The effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for tasks such as Automatic Speech Recognition has fostered interest in RNN inference acceleration. Due to the recurrent nature and data dependencies of RNN computations, prior work has designed customized architectures specifically tailored to the computation pattern of RNN, getting high computation efficiency for certain chosen model sizes. However, given that the dimensionality of RNNs varies a lot for different tasks, it is crucial to generalize this efficiency to diverse configurations. In this work, we identify adaptiveness as a key feature that is missing from today's RNN accelerators. In particular, we first show the problem of low resource-utilization and low adaptiveness for the state-of-the-art RNN implementations on GPU, FPGA and ASIC architectures. To solve these issues, we propose an intelligent tiled-based dispatching mechanism for increasing the adaptiveness of RNN computation, in order to efficiently handle the data dependencies. To do so, we propose Sharp as a hardware accelerator, which pipelines RNN computation using an effective scheduling scheme to hide most of the dependent serialization. Furthermore, Sharp employs dynamic reconfigurable architecture to adapt to the model's characteristics. Sharp achieves 2x, 2.8x, and 82x speedups on average, considering different RNN models and resource budgets, compared to the state-of-the-art ASIC, FPGA, and GPU implementations, respectively. Furthermore, we provide significant energy-reduction with respect to the previous solutions, due to the low power dissipation of Sharp (321 GFLOPS/Watt).
Reza Yazdani, Olatunji Ruwase, Minjia Zhang, Yuxiong He, Jose-Maria Arnau, Antonio Gonzalez
arXiv:1911.01258 · cs.LG, cs.AR, cs.NE, cs.PF · submitted Nov 4, 2019 · updated May 21, 2023
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