We present a full-stack optimization framework for accelerating inference of CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks) and validate the approach with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) implementations. By jointly optimizing CNN models, computing architectures, and hardware implementations, our full-stack approach achieves unprecedented performance in the trade-off space characterized by inference latency, energy efficiency, hardware utilization and inference accuracy. As a validation vehicle, we have implemented a 170MHz FPGA inference chip achieving 2.28ms latency for the ImageNet benchmark. The achieved latency is among the lowest reported in the literature while achieving comparable accuracy. However, our chip shines in that it has 9x higher energy efficiency compared to other implementations achieving comparable latency. A highlight of our full-stack approach which attributes to the achieved high energy efficiency is an efficient Selector-Accumulator (SAC) architecture for implementing the multiplier-accumulator (MAC) operation present in any digital CNN hardware. For instance, compared to a FPGA implementation for a traditional 8-bit MAC, SAC substantially reduces required hardware resources (4.85x fewer Look-up Tables) and power consumption (2.48x).
In recent years, numerous FPGA designs for CNN inference have been proposed (generally targeting prominent networks such as LeNet-5 @cite_14 , AlexNet @cite_0 , and VGG-16 @cite_13 ) with the key objective of designing a system with low latency and high energy efficiency. A common strategy deployed by these designs is to minimize the degree of weight and data movement, especially from off-chip memory, as they add significant overhead in terms of both latency and power consumption.
@cite_0 @cite_14 @cite_13
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Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have gained popularity in many computer vision applications such as image classification, face detection, and video analysis, because of their ability to train and classify with high accuracy. Due to multiple convolution and fully-connected layers that are compute- memory-intensive, it is difficult to perform real-time classification with low power consumption on today?s computing systems. FPGAs have been widely explored as hardware accelerators for CNNs because of their reconfigurability and energy efficiency, as well as fast turn-around-time, especially with high-level synthesis methodologies. Previous FPGA-based CNN accelerators, however, typically implemented generic accelerators agnostic to the CNN configuration, where the reconfigurable capabilities of FPGAs are not fully leveraged to maximize the overall system throughput. In this work, we present a systematic design space exploration methodology to maximize the throughput of an OpenCL-based FPGA accelerator for a given CNN model, considering the FPGA resource constraints such as on-chip memory, registers, computational resources and external memory bandwidth. The proposed methodology is demonstrated by optimizing two representative large-scale CNNs, AlexNet and VGG, on two Altera Stratix-V FPGA platforms, DE5-Net and P395-D8 boards, which have different hardware resources. We achieve a peak performance of 136.5 GOPS for convolution operation, and 117.8 GOPS for the entire VGG network that performs ImageNet classification on P395-D8 board. In recent years, convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods have achieved great success in a large number of applications and have been among the most powerful and widely used techniques in computer vision. However, CNN-based methods are com-putational-intensive and resource-consuming, and thus are hard to be integrated into embedded systems such as smart phones, smart glasses, and robots. FPGA is one of the most promising platforms for accelerating CNN, but the limited bandwidth and on-chip memory size limit the performance of FPGA accelerator for CNN. In this paper, we go deeper with the embedded FPGA platform on accelerating CNNs and propose a CNN accelerator design on embedded FPGA for Image-Net large-scale image classification. We first present an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art CNN models and show that Convolutional layers are computational-centric and Fully-Connected layers are memory-centric. Then the dynamic-precision data quantization method and a convolver design that is efficient for all layer types in CNN are proposed to improve the bandwidth and resource utilization. Results show that only 0.4 accuracy loss is introduced by our data quantization flow for the very deep VGG16 model when 8 4-bit quantization is used. A data arrangement method is proposed to further ensure a high utilization of the external memory bandwidth. Finally, a state-of-the-art CNN, VGG16-SVD, is implemented on an embedded FPGA platform as a case study. VGG16-SVD is the largest and most accurate network that has been implemented on FPGA end-to-end so far. The system on Xilinx Zynq ZC706 board achieves a frame rate at 4.45 fps with the top-5 accuracy of 86.66 using 16-bit quantization. The average performance of convolutional layers and the full CNN is 187.8 GOP s and 137.0 GOP s under 150MHz working frequency, which outperform previous approaches significantly. The recently reported successes of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in many areas has generated wide interest in the development of FPGA-based accelerators. To achieve high performance and energy efficiency, an FPGA-based accelerator must fully utilize the limited computation resources and minimize the data communication and memory access, both of which are impacted and constrained by a variety of design parameters, e.g. the degree and dimension of parallelism, the size of on-chip buffers, the bandwidth of the external memory, and many more. The large design space of the accelerator makes it impractical to search for the optimal design in the implementation phase. To address this problem, a performance model is described to estimate the performance and resource utilization of an FPGA implementation. By this means, the performance bottleneck and design bound can be identified and the optimal design option can be explored early in the design phase. The proposed performance model is validated using a variety of CNN algorithms comparing the results with on-board test results on two different FPGAs. Recently, FPGA-based CNN accelerators have demonstrated superior energy efficiency compared to high-performance devices like GPGPUs. However, due to the constrained on-chip resource and many other factors, single-board FPGA designs may have difficulties in achieving optimal energy efficiency. In this paper we present a deeply pipelined multi-FPGA architecture that expands the design space for optimal performance and energy efficiency. A dynamic programming algorithm is proposed to map the CNN computing layers efficiently to different FPGA boards. To demonstrate the potential of the architecture, we built a prototype system with seven FPGA boards connected with high-speed serial links. The experimental results on AlexNet and VGG-16 show that the prototype can achieve up to 21x and 2x energy efficiency compared to optimized multi-core CPU and GPU implementations, respectively.