Evaluation of heterogeneous AIoT Accelerators within VEDLIoT

Within VEDLIoT, a project targeting the development of energy-efficient Deep Learning for distributed AIoT applications, several accelerator platforms based on technologies like CPUs, embedded GPUs, FPGAs, or specialized ASICs are evaluated. The VEDLIoT approach is based on modular and scalable cognitive IoT hardware platforms. Modular microserver technology enables the integration of different, heterogeneous accelerators into one platform. Benchmarking of the different accelerators takes into account performance, energy efficiency and accuracy. The results in this paper provide a solid overview regarding available accelerator solutions and provide guidance for hardware selection for AIoT applications from far edge to cloud. VEDLIoT is an H2020 EU project which started in November 2020. It is currently in an intermediate stage. The focus is on the considerations of the performance and energy efficiency of hardware accelerators. Apart from the hardware and accelerator focus presented in this paper, the project also covers toolchain, security and safety aspects. The resulting technology is tested on a wide range of AIoT applications.