Our new paper “Fused Layer CNN Accelerators” by Manoj Alwani, Han Chen, Michael Ferdman, and Peter Milder has been accepted to appear at MICRO 2016.
A preprint is available here.
In this work, we observe that a previously unexplored dimension exists in the design space of CNN accelerators that focuses on the dataflow across convolutional layers. We find that we are able to fuse the processing of multiple CNN layers by modifying the order in which the input data are brought on chip, enabling caching of intermediate data between the evaluation of adjacent CNN layers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by constructing a fused-layer CNN accelerator for the first five convolutional layers of the VGGNet-E network, and find that, by using 362KB of on-chip storage, our fused-layer accelerator minimizes off-chip feature map data transfer, reducing the total transfer by 95%, from 77MB down to 3.6MB per image.
This entry was posted on June 28, 2016.