fpgaConvNet: Automated Mapping of Convolutional Neural Networks on FPGAs (Abstract Only)

Abstract

In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have become the state-of-the-art in several Artificial Intelligence tasks. Across the range 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 the different performance needs. However, the complexity of ConvNet models keeps increasing leading to a large design space. This work presents fpgaConvNet, an end-to-end framework for mapping ConvNets on FPGAs. The proposed framework employs an automated design methodology based on the Synchronous Dataflow (SDF) paradigm and defines a set of transformations on the SDF graph in order to efficiently explore the architectural design space. By treating high-throughput and latency-critical systems separately, the presented tool is able to efficiently explore the architectural design space and to generate hardware designs from high-level ConvNet specifications, explicitly optimised for the performance metric of interest. Overall our framework yields designs that improve the performance density and the performance efficiency by up to 6× and 4.49× respectively over existing highly-optimised FPGA, DSP and embedded GPU work.