F5-HD - Fast Flexible FPGA-based Framework for Refreshing Hyperdimensional Computing.

Hyperdimensional (HD) computing is a novel computational paradigm that emulates the brain functionality in performing cognitive tasks. The underlying computation of HD involves a substantial number of element-wise operations (e.g., addition and multiplications) on ultra-wise hypervectors, in the granularities of as small as a single bit, which can be effectively parallelized and pipelined. In addition, though different HD applications might vary in terms of number of input features and output classes (labels), they generally follow the same computation flow. Such characteristics of HD computing inimitably matches with the intrinsic capabilities of FPGAs, making these devices a unique solution for accelerating these applications. In this paper, we propose F5-HD, a fast and flexible FPGA-based framework for refreshing the performance of HD computing. F5-HD eliminates the arduous task of handcrafted designing of hardware accelerators by automatically generating an FPGA implementation of HD accelerator leveraging a template of optimized processing elements, according to the applications specification and user's constraint. Our evaluations using different classification benchmarks revealed that F5-HD provides 6.9x and 7.8× (11.9× and 1.7×) higher energy efficiency improvement and faster training (inference) as compared to an optimized implementation of HD on AMD R9 390 GPU, respectively.