Coarse-Grained Floorplanning for streaming CNN applications on Multi-Die FPGAs

With the vast adoption of FPGAs in the cloud, it becomes necessary to investigate architectures and mechanisms for the efficient deployment of CNN into multi-FPGAs cloud Infrastructure. However, neural networks’ growing size and complexity, coupled with communication and off-chip memory bottlenecks, make it increasingly difficult for multi-FPGA designs to achieve high resource utilization. In this work, we introduce a scalable framework that supports the efficient integration of CNN applications into a cloud infrastructure that exposes multi-Die FPGAs to cloud developers. Our framework is equipped is with two mechanisms to facilitate the deployment of CNN inference on FPGA. First, we propose a model to find the parameters that maximize the parallelism within the resource budget while maintaining a balanced rate between the layers. Then, we propose an efficient Coarse-Grained graph partitioning algorithm for high-quality and scalable routability-drive placement of CNN’s components on the FPGAs. Prototyping results achieve an overall 37% higher frequency, with lower resource usage compared to a baseline implementation on the same number of FPGAs.