Recently, the field of deep learning has received great attention by the scientific community and it is used to provide improved solutions to many computer vision problems. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully used to attack problems such as object recognition, object detection, semantic segmentation, and scene understanding. The rapid development of deep learning goes hand by hand with the adaptation of GPUs for accelerating its processes, such as network training and inference. Even though FPGA design exists long before the use of GPUs for accelerating computations and despite the fact that high-level synthesis (HLS) tools are getting more attractive, the adaptation of FPGAs for deep learning research and application development is poor due to the requirement of hardware design related expertise. This work presents a workflow for deep learning mobile application acceleration on small low-cost low-power FPGA devices using HLS tools. This workflow eases the design of an improved version of the SqueezeJet accelerator used for the speedup of mobile-friendly low-parameter ImageNet class CNNs, such as the SqueezeNet v1.1 and the ZynqNet. Additionally, the workflow includes the development of an HLS-driven analytical model which is used for performance estimation of the accelerator. This model can be also used to direct the design process and lead to future design improvements and optimizations.
In @cite_12 a latency-driven design method is presented as an extension of the fpgaConvNet modeling framework @cite_10 . This work models CNNs using the synchronous dataflow (SDF) model of computation. CNNs are interpreted as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) whose nodes are mapped to hardware building blocks which are interconnected to form the final SDF graph. The SDF model of computation allows the generation of static schedules of execution and the calculation of the amount of buffer memory between the interconnected hardware building blocks. The SDF graph is partitioned along its depth and a single flexible reference architecture is generated which enables the execution of all the subgraphs. In contrast to Angle-Eye, this reference architecture is tailored to a specific CNN and it is optimized in terms of latency. Their framework produces synthesizable Vivado HLS code for the resulting architecture.
@cite_10 @cite_12
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Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) are a powerful Deep Learning model, providing state-of-the-art accuracy to many emerging classification problems. However, ConvNet classification is a computationally heavy task, suffering from rapid complexity scaling. This paper presents fpgaConvNet, a novel domain-specific modelling framework together with an automated design methodology for the mapping of ConvNets onto reconfigurable FPGA-based platforms. By interpreting ConvNet classification as a streaming application, the proposed framework employs the Synchronous Dataflow (SDF) model of computation as its basis and proposes a set of transformations on the SDF graph that explore the performance-resource design space, while taking into account platform-specific resource constraints. A comparison with existing ConvNet FPGA works shows that the proposed fully-automated methodology yields hardware designs that improve the performance density by up to 1.62x and reach up to 90.75 of the raw performance of architectures that are hand-tuned for particular ConvNets. In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have become the quintessential component of several state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence tasks. Across the spectrum of applications, the performance needs vary significantly, from high-throughput image recognition to the very low-latency requirements of autonomous cars. In this context, FPGAs can provide a potential platform that can be optimally configured based on different performance requirements. However, with the increasing complexity of ConvNet models, the architectural design space becomes overwhelmingly large, asking for principled design flows that address the application-level needs. This paper presents a latency-driven design methodology for mapping ConvNets on FPGAs. The proposed design flow employs novel transformations over a Synchronous Dataflow-based modelling framework together with a latency-centric optimisation procedure in order to efficiently explore the design space targeting low-latency designs. Quantitative evaluation shows large improvements in latency when latency-driven optimisation is in place yielding designs that improve the latency of AlexNet by 73.54× and VGG16 by 5.61× over throughput-optimised designs.