FLight: FPGA Acceleration of Lightweight DNN Model Inference in Industrial Analytics

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been recently in the focus of interest owing to their high-quality results in various application domains of big data analytics. The lack of end-to-end toolchains that can automatically optimize and translate a DNN algorithm, usually implemented in high-level languages, on FPGA-based platform hinders software developers to exploit such platforms. A few available toolchains, namely Xilinx DPU, have been optimized for computational expensive applications, e.g., real-time image and video processing, and therefore they introduce large performance overhead on lightweight applications, e.g., sensor-driven decision analytics. In this paper, we introduce the FLight framework to fully automatize the acceleration of lightweight DNN algorithms on FPGA-based embedded platforms. The framework takes a trained model in TensorFlow/Keras as input and generates an optimized synthesizable C++ version and maps it on the target platform using HLS tools. FLight is an easy-to-use framework and does not require deep knowledge of embedded system design since it automatically performs all the required mapping steps. FLight supports the acceleration of various deep learning algorithms, e.g., Feed-Forward Neural networks (FFNNs), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and sequential models like Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). We evaluated the applicability of FLight with various DNN models on both academic and industrial datasets. As a case study, we exploited the FLight framework for wind turbine condition monitoring using an industrial dataset provided by Weidmiiller Monitoring Systems GmbH. The experimental results revealed the 40 times speedup compared to the Xilinx DPU framework.