Ultra Low Latency Machine Learning for Scientific Edge Applications

In this paper, we present an FPGA design of an extremely low latency scientific machine learning application at the edge. Real-time prediction of errant high-energy particle beams at scientific facilities such as Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) is crucial to avoid damages to the equipment. Machine learning techniques are becoming increasingly effective to detect subtle signatures of the errant beams in the noisy sensor signals. However, to minimize potential damage done by errant beam, real-time errant beam detection has to be completed with extremely low latency, usually less than 1 microsecond. By stream processing the input features and employing out-of-order execution of decision nodes among the decision trees, we demonstrate that our highly efficient FPGA implementation can achieve 60 nanoseconds of computing latency for complex random forest models with 10,000 input features.