Anticipating and eliminating redundant computations in accelerated sparse training

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are the state of art in image, speech, and text processing. To address long training times and high energy consumption, custom accelerators can exploit sparsity, that is zero-valued weights, activations, and gradients. Proposed sparse Convolution Neural Network (CNN) accelerators support training with no more than one dynamic sparse convolution input. Among existing accelerator classes, the only ones supporting two-sided dynamic sparsity are outer-product-based accelerators. However, when mapping a convolution onto an outer product, multiplications occur that do not correspond to any valid output. These Redundant Cartesian Products (RCPs) decrease energy efficiency and performance. We observe that in sparse training, up to 90% of computations are RCPs resulting from the convolution of large matrices for weight updates during the backward pass of CNN training. In this work, we design a mechanism, ANT, to anticipate and eliminate RCPs, enabling more efficient sparse training when integrated with an outer-product accelerator. By anticipating over 90% of RCPs, ANT achieves a geometric mean of 3.71× speed up over an SCNN-like accelerator [67] on 90% sparse training using DenseNet-121 [38], ResNet18 [35], VGG16 [73], Wide ResNet (WRN) [85], and ResNet-50 [35], with 4.40× decrease in energy consumption and 0.0017mm2 of additional area. We extend ANT to sparse matrix multiplication, so that the same accelerator can anticipate RCPs in sparse fully-connected layers, transformers, and RNNs.