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Data-Driven Offline Optimization for Architecting Hardware Accelerators (arxiv.org)
2 points by rbanffy on Jul 11, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of running simulations to pick chip designs, this tool learns a cautious guess of how designs perform from old simulation logs, then searches for good ones without new simulations. It found designs 1.54x faster than the best simulation-heavy approach while cutting simulation time 93%.

Abstract · Data-Driven Offline Optimization For Architecting Hardware Accelerators

Industry has gradually moved towards application-specific hardware accelerators in order to attain higher efficiency. While such a paradigm shift is already starting to show promising results, designers need to spend considerable manual effort and perform a large number of time-consuming simulations to find accelerators that can accelerate multiple target applications while obeying design constraints. Moreover, such a "simulation-driven" approach must be re-run from scratch every time the set of target applications or design constraints change. An alternative paradigm is to use a "data-driven", offline approach that utilizes logged simulation data, to architect hardware accelerators, without needing any form of simulations. Such an approach not only alleviates the need to run time-consuming simulation, but also enables data reuse and applies even when set of target applications changes. In this paper, we develop such a data-driven offline optimization method for designing hardware accelerators, dubbed PRIME, that enjoys all of these properties. Our approach learns a conservative, robust estimate of the desired cost function, utilizes infeasible points, and optimizes the design against this estimate without any additional simulator queries during optimization. PRIME architects accelerators -- tailored towards both single and multiple applications -- improving performance upon state-of-the-art simulation-driven methods by about 1.54x and 1.20x, while considerably reducing the required total simulation time by 93% and 99%, respectively. In addition, PRIME also architects effective accelerators for unseen applications in a zero-shot setting, outperforming simulation-based methods by 1.26x.

Aviral Kumar, Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Milad Hashemi, Kevin Swersky, Sergey Levine
arXiv:2110.11346 · cs.AR, cs.LG · submitted Oct 20, 2021 · updated Feb 3, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · First two authors contributed equally; published at ICLR 2022

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