On-Chip Memory Access Reduction for Energy-Efficient Dilated Convolution Processing

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Abstract

Dilated convolutions have recently become increasingly popular in deep neural networks. However, the inference of these operations on hardware accelerators is not mature enough to reach the efficiency of standard convolutions. Therefore, we extended a dedicated accelerator for dilated convolutions to reduce the number of energy-intensive accesses to the on-chip memory. We achieve this by applying the principle of feature map decomposition to an output-stationary compute array with a strided feature loading. Our solution shows a 50% reduction in memory accesses for an unpadded 3 × 3 kernel and a dilation rate of 9 compared to a recently proposed dilated convolution accelerator. We also support flexible parameter selection for kernel sizes and dilation rates to meet the requirements of modern neural networks. The energy consumption of the additional hardware modules is less than the savings achieved by the reduced memory accesses. This results in a relative energy saving by a factor of 4.77 for dilated convolutions with unpadded 3 × 3 kernels.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEmbedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation
EditorsCristina Silvano, Marc Reichenbach, Christian Pilato
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media B.V.
Pages478-485
Number of pages8
ISBN (electronic)978-3-031-46077-7
ISBN (print)978-3-031-46076-0
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume14385 LNCS
ISSN0302-9743

Conference

Title23rd International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling and Simulation
SubtitleArchitectures, Modeling, and Simulation
Abbreviated titleSAMOS XXIII
Conference number23
Duration2 - 6 July 2023
Website
Degree of recognitionInternational event
LocationDoryssa Seaside Resort
CityPythagorion
CountryGreece

Keywords

Sustainable Development Goals

Keywords

  • Accelerator, Decomposition, Dilated Convolution, DNN, On-Chip Memory