SCONNA: A Stochastic Computing Based Optical Accelerator for Ultra-Fast, Energy-Efficient Inference of Integer-Quantized CNNs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07036v1
• Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2023 13:35:15 GMT
• Title: SCONNA: A Stochastic Computing Based Optical Accelerator for Ultra-Fast, Energy-Efficient Inference of Integer-Quantized CNNs
• Authors: Sairam Sri Vatsavai, Venkata Sai Praneeth Karempudi, Ishan Thakkar, Ahmad Salehi, and Todd Hastings
• Abstract summary: A CNN inference task uses convolution operations that are typically transformed into vector-dot-product (VDP) operations. Several photonic microring resonators (MRRs) based hardware architectures have been proposed to accelerate integer-quantized CNNs. Existing photonic MRR-based analog accelerators exhibit a very strong trade-off between the achievable input/weight precision and VDP operation size.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The acceleration of a CNN inference task uses convolution operations that are typically transformed into vector-dot-product (VDP) operations. Several photonic microring resonators (MRRs) based hardware architectures have been proposed to accelerate integer-quantized CNNs with remarkably higher throughput and energy efficiency compared to their electronic counterparts. However, the existing photonic MRR-based analog accelerators exhibit a very strong trade-off between the achievable input/weight precision and VDP operation size, which severely restricts their achievable VDP operation size for the quantized input/weight precision of 4 bits and higher. The restricted VDP operation size ultimately suppresses computing throughput to severely diminish the achievable performance benefits. To address this shortcoming, we for the first time present a merger of stochastic computing and MRR-based CNN accelerators. To leverage the innate precision flexibility of stochastic computing, we invent an MRR-based optical stochastic multiplier (OSM). We employ multiple OSMs in a cascaded manner using dense wavelength division multiplexing, to forge a novel Stochastic Computing based Optical Neural Network Accelerator (SCONNA). SCONNA achieves significantly high throughput and energy efficiency for accelerating inferences of high-precision quantized CNNs. Our evaluation for the inference of four modern CNNs at 8-bit input/weight precision indicates that SCONNA provides improvements of up to 66.5x, 90x, and 91x in frames-per-second (FPS), FPS/W and FPS/W/mm2, respectively, on average over two photonic MRR-based analog CNN accelerators from prior work, with Top-1 accuracy drop of only up to 0.4% for large CNNs and up to 1.5% for small CNNs. We developed a transaction-level, event-driven python-based simulator for the evaluation of SCONNA and other accelerators (https://github.com/uky-UCAT/SC_ONN_SIM.git).

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