Investigating Opportunities and Challenges in Modeling and Designing Scale-Out DNN Accelerators

The rapid growth of deep learning used in practical applications such as speech recognition, computer vision, natural language processing, robotics, any many other fields has opened the gate to new technology possibilities. Unfortunately, traditional hardware systems are being stretched to the maximum to accommodate the intense workloads presented by state-of-the-art deep learning processes in a time when transistor technology is not scaling. To serve the demand for better computational power and more specialized computations, specialized hardware needs to be developed that provides better latency and bandwidth specifications for various demanding applications. The trend in the semi-conductor industry is to move towards heterogenous System-OnChip (SoC) thereby choosing application specific performance vs. generality seen in most CPU architectures today. In most situations, hardware engineers are left to construct systems that serve the needs of various applications, often needing to predict the use-cases of the system. As with any field, the ability to predict and act on the future innovation trends of the industry is the difference between success and failure. A novel simulator for the design of convolutional neural network accelerators is presented and described in detail named SCALE-Sim (Systolic CNN Accelerator Simulator). The simulator is available as an open-sourced repository and has 2 primary use-cases in which computer architects can extract significant results. The first use-case is for system designers who would like to integrate an existing DNN accelerator architecture into a larger SoC and would be interested in system-level characterization results. The second use-case is for an accelerator architect who would like to use the tool to explore the accelerator design space by sweeping through design parameters.

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Georgia Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Nadella, Vineet

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Krishna, Tushar

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Krishna, Tushar
• Mukhopadhyay, Saibal
• Daglis, Alexandros

• Deep Learning, Computer Architecture

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1853/64650

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.gatech.edu:1853/64650