Optimizing FPGA-based CNN accelerator for energy efficiency with an extended Roofline model

Authors: SAYED OMID AYAT, MOHAMED KHALIL-HANI, AB AL-HADI AB RAHMAN

Abstract: In recent years, the convolutional neural network (CNN) has found wide acceptance in solving practical computer vision and image recognition problems. Also recently, due to its flexibility, faster development time, and energy efficiency, the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) has become an attractive solution to exploit the inherent parallelism in the feedforward process of the CNN. However, to meet the demands for high accuracy of today's practical recognition applications that typically have massive datasets, the sizes of CNNs have to be larger and deeper. Enlargement of the CNN aggravates the problem of off-chip memory bottleneck in the FPGA platform since there is not enough space to save large datasets on-chip. In this work, we propose a memory system architecture that best matches the off-chip memory traffic with the optimum throughput of the computation engine, while it operates at the maximum allowable frequency. With the help of an extended version of the Roofline model proposed in this work, we can estimate memory bandwidth utilization of the system at different operating frequencies since the proposed model considers operating frequency in addition to bandwidth utilization and throughput. In order to find the optimal solution that has the best energy efficiency, we make a trade-off between energy efficiency and computational throughput. This solution saves 18% of energy utilization with the trade-off having less than 2% reduction in throughput performance. We also propose to use a race-to-halt strategy to further improve the energy efficiency of the designed CNN accelerator. Experimental results show that our CNN accelerator can achieve a peak performance of 52.11 GFLOPS and energy efficiency of 10.02 GFLOPS/W on a ZYNQ ZC706 FPGA board running at 250 MHz, which outperforms most previous approaches.

Keywords: Convolutional neural network, field-programmable gate array, energy efficiency, Roofline model, race-to-halt strategy.

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