Deep Learning Acceleration with Neuron-to-Memory Transformation

Deep neural networks (DNN) have demonstrated effectiveness for various applications such as image processing, video segmentation, and speech recognition. Running state-of-theart DNNs on current systems mostly relies on either generalpurpose processors, ASIC designs, or FPGA accelerators, all of which suffer from data movements due to the limited on-chip memory and data transfer bandwidth. In this work, we propose a novel framework, called RAPIDNN, which performs neuron-to-memory transformation in order to accelerate DNNs in a highly parallel architecture. RAPIDNN reinterprets a DNN model and maps it into a specialized accelerator, which is designed using non-volatile memory blocks that model four fundamental DNN operations, i.e., multiplication, addition, activation functions, and pooling. The framework extracts representative operands of a DNN model, e.g., weights and input values, using clustering methods to optimize the model for in-memory processing. Then, it maps the extracted operands and their pre-computed results into the accelerator memory blocks. At runtime, the accelerator identifies computation results based on efficient in-memory search capability which also provides tunability of approximation to improve computation efficiency further. Our evaluation shows that RAPIDNN achieves 68.4×, 49.5× energy efficiency improvement and 48.1×, 10.9× speedup as compared to ISAAC and PipeLayer, the state-of-the-art DNN accelerators, while ensuring less than 0.5% quality loss.