DNNPipe: Dynamic programming-based optimal DNN partitioning for pipelined inference on IoT networks

Pipeline parallelization is an effective technique that enables the efficient execution of deep neural network (DNN) inference on resource-constrained IoT devices. To enable pipeline parallelization across computing nodes with asymmetric performance profiles, interconnected via low-latency, high-bandwidth networks, we propose DNNPipe, a DNN partitioning algorithm that constructs a pipeline plan for a given DNN. The primary objective of DNNPipe is to maximize the throughput of DNN inference while minimizing the runtime overhead of DNN partitioning, which is repeatedly executed online in dynamically changing IoT environments. To achieve this, DNNPipe uses dynamic programming (DP) with pruning techniques that preserve optimality to explore the search space and find the optimal pipeline plan whose maximum stage time is no greater than that of any other possible pipeline plan. Specifically, it aggressively prunes suboptimal pipeline plans using two pruning techniques: upper-bound-based pruning and under-utilized-stage pruning . Our experimental results demonstrate that pipelined inference using an obtained optimal pipeline plan improves DNN throughput by up to 1.78 times compared to the highest performing single device and DNNPipe achieves up to 98.26% lower runtime overhead compared to PipeEdge, the fastest known optimal DNN partitioning algorithm.