Accelerating recurrent neural networks in analytics servers: Comparison of FPGA, CPU, GPU, and ASIC

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) provide state-of-the-art accuracy for performing analytics on datasets with sequence (e.g., language model). This paper studied a state-of-the-art RNN variant, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). We first proposed memoization optimization to avoid 3 out of the 6 dense matrix...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	International Conference on Field-programmable Logic and Applications pp. 1 - 4
Main Authors:	Nurvitadhi, Eriko, Jaewoong Sim, Sheffield, David, Mishra, Asit, Krishnan, Srivatsan, Marr, Debbie
Format:	Conference Proceeding
Language:	English
Published:	EPFL 01.08.2016
Subjects:	Classification algorithms Field programmable gate arrays Graphics processing units Logic gates Random access memory Recurrent neural networks Runtime
ISSN:	1946-1488
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) provide state-of-the-art accuracy for performing analytics on datasets with sequence (e.g., language model). This paper studied a state-of-the-art RNN variant, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). We first proposed memoization optimization to avoid 3 out of the 6 dense matrix vector multiplications (SGEMVs) that are the majority of the computation in GRU. Then, we study the opportunities to accelerate the remaining SGEMVs using FPGAs, in comparison to 14-nm ASIC, GPU, and multi-core CPU. Results show that FPGA provides superior performance/Watt over CPU and GPU because FPGA's on-chip BRAMs, hard DSPs, and reconfigurable fabric allow for efficiently extracting fine-grained parallelisms from small/medium size matrices used by GRU. Moreover, newer FPGAs with more DSPs, on-chip BRAMs, and higher frequency have the potential to narrow the FPGA-ASIC efficiency gap.
ISSN:	1946-1488
DOI:	10.1109/FPL.2016.7577314