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AutoWS: Automate Weights Streaming in Layer-wise Pipelined DNN Accelerators

Hardware Architecture 2023-11-09 v1

Abstract

With the great success of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), the design of efficient hardware accelerators has triggered wide interest in the research community. Existing research explores two architectural strategies: sequential layer execution and layer-wise pipelining. While the former supports a wider range of models, the latter is favoured for its enhanced customization and efficiency. A challenge for the layer-wise pipelining architecture is its substantial demand for the on-chip memory for weights storage, impeding the deployment of large-scale networks on resource-constrained devices. This paper introduces AutoWS, a pioneering memory management methodology that exploits both on-chip and off-chip memory to optimize weight storage within a layer-wise pipelining architecture, taking advantage of its static schedule. Through a comprehensive investigation on both the hardware design and the Design Space Exploration, our methodology is fully automated and enables the deployment of large-scale DNN models on resource-constrained devices, which was not possible in existing works that target layer-wise pipelining architectures. AutoWS is open-source: https://github.com/Yu-Zhewen/AutoWS

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.04764,
  title  = {AutoWS: Automate Weights Streaming in Layer-wise Pipelined DNN Accelerators},
  author = {Zhewen Yu and Christos-Savvas Bouganis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.04764},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

accepted by DATE2024

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:15:14.830Z