FPRA: A Fine-grained Parallel RRAM Architecture

Xiao Liu, Minxuan Zhou, Rachata Ausavarungnirun, Sean Eilert, Ameen Akel, Tajana Rosing, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, Jishen Zhao

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Emerging resistive memory (RRAM) based crossbar array is a promising technology to accelerate neural network applications. RRAM-based CNN accelerators support a high-degree of intra-layer and inter-layer parallelism. The intra-layer parallelism duplicates kernels for each network layer while the inter-layer parallelism allows execution of each layer when a portion of input data is available. However, previously proposed RRAM-based accelerators do not leverage data sharing between duplicate kernels leading to significant idleness of crossbar arrays during inference. This shared data creates data dependencies that stall the processing of the next layer in the pipeline. To address these issues, we propose Fine-grained Parallel RRAM Architecture (FPRA), a novel architectural design, to improve parallelism for pipeline-enabled RRAM-based accelerators. FPRA addresses the data sharing issue with kernel batching and data sharing aware memory. Kernel batching rearranges the layout of the kernels and minimizes the data dependencies created by the input shared data. The data sharing aware memory uniformly buffers the input and output data for each layer, efficiently dispatching data to duplicate kernels while reducing the amount of data transferred between layers. We evaluate FPRA on eight popular image recognition CNN models with various configurations in a cycle-accurate simulator. We find that FPRA manages to achieve 2.0 \times average latency speedup, and 2.1 \times average throughput increase, as compared to the state-of-the-art RRAM-based accelerators.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2021 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design, ISLPED 2021
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781665439220
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 26 2021
Event2021 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design, ISLPED 2021 - Boston, United States
Duration: Jul 26 2021Jul 28 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design
Volume2021-July
ISSN (Print)1533-4678

Conference

Conference2021 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design, ISLPED 2021
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston
Period7/26/217/28/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Engineering

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