A GPU-Outperforming FPGA Accelerator Architecture for Binary Convolutional Neural Networks

TitleA GPU-Outperforming FPGA Accelerator Architecture for Binary Convolutional Neural Networks
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2018
AuthorsLi, YI, Liu, Z, Xu, K, Yu, H, Ren, F
JournalACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing (JETC) - Special Issue on Frontiers of Hardware and Algorithms for On-chip Learning​
Volume14
Issue2
Start Page18.1
Pagination18.16
Date Published07/2018
Keywords (or New Research Field)psclab
Abstract

FPGA-based hardware accelerators for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have obtained great attentions due to their higher energy efficiency than GPUs. However, it is challenging for FPGA-based solutions to achieve a higher throughput than GPU counterparts. In this paper, we demonstrate that FPGA acceleration can be a superior solution in terms of both throughput and energy efficiency when a CNN is trained with binary constraints on weights and activations. Specifically, we propose an optimized FPGA accelerator architecture tailored for bitwise convolution and normalization that features massive spatial parallelism with deep pipelines stages. A key advantage of the FPGA accelerator is that its performance is insensitive to data batch size, while the performance of GPU acceleration varies largely depending on the batch size of the data. Experiment results show that the proposed accelerator architecture for binary CNNs running on a Virtex-7 FPGA is 8.3x faster and 75x more energy-efficient than a Titan X GPU for processing online individual requests in small batch sizes. For processing static data in large batch sizes, the proposed solution is on a par with a Titan X GPU in terms of throughput while delivering 9.5x higher energy efficiency.

URLhttps://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3154839
DOI10.1145/3154839
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