Design and Optimization of Reconfigurable Hardware Accelerators for Machine Learning.
The exponential growth of Machine Learning (ML), particularly Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), has precipitated a critical demand for hardware platforms capable of delivering high throughput and energy efficiency. As model complexity scales from millions to billions of parameters, general-purpose processors struggle to maintain efficiency due to the "von Neumann bottleneck" and excessive control overhead. While Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) offer peak efficiency, they lack the post-fabrication flexibility required to adapt to rapidly evolving model architectures and novel activation functions. This paper proposes a novel Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA) specifically optimized for ML workloads, termed Flex-Tensor. We introduce a hierarchical interconnect system designed to minimize data movement and a specialized Processing Element (PE) design that supports dynamic mixed-precision arithmetic. Furthermore, we present a compiler-assisted optimization framework that maps complex tensor operations onto the reconfigurable fabric using advanced loop tiling and systolic dataflow strategies. Simulation results demonstrate that Flex-Tensor achieves 2.4x better energy-delay product (EDP) compared to standard FPGA implementations and approaches 85% of the efficiency of fixed-function accelerators while maintaining full programmability for emerging neural network layers.
Authors
- Kiran Kumar R.
- Pastor E
- Byrareddy H C
Institutions
- Government of India (IN)
- Government of Karnataka (IN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2024-09-12
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18016021
- Primary Topic
- Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00