fpgaConvNet: mapping regular and irregular convolutional neural networks on FPGAs
File(s)tnnls_svcb_2018.pdf (1.18 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Venieris, Stylianos
Bouganis, C
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Since neural networks renaissance, convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have demonstrated a state-of-the-art performance in several emerging artificial intelligence tasks. The deployment of ConvNets in real-life applications requires power-efficient designs that meet the application-level performance needs. In this context, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can provide a potential platform that can be tailored to application-specific requirements. However, with the complexity of ConvNet models increasing rapidly, the ConvNet-to-FPGA design space becomes prohibitively large. This paper presents fpgaConvNet, an end-to-end framework for the optimized mapping of ConvNets on FPGAs. The proposed framework comprises an automated design methodology based on the synchronous dataflow (SDF) paradigm and defines a set of SDF transformations in order to efficiently navigate the architectural design space. By proposing a systematic multiobjective optimization formulation, the presented framework is able to generate hardware designs that are cooptimized for the ConvNet workload, the target device, and the application's performance metric of interest. Quantitative evaluation shows that the proposed methodology yields hardware designs that improve the performance by up to 6.65x over highly optimized graphics processing unit designs for the same power constraints and achieve up to 2.94x higher performance density compared with the state-of-the-art FPGA-based ConvNet architectures.
Date Issued
2019-02-01
Date Acceptance
2018-05-31
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2019, 30 (2), pp.326-342
ISSN
2162-2388
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
326
End Page
342
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
Volume
30
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Identifier
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8401525
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Computer Science
Engineering
Convolutional neural networks (ConvNets)
design space exploration (DSE)
field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)
parallel reconfigurable architectures
ACCELERATOR
Artificial Intelligence & Image Processing
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2018-07-02