FATE: Fast and accurate timing error prediction framework for low power DNN accelerator design

Jeff Jun Zhang, Siddharth Garg

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

Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNN) are increasingly being accelerated on application-specific hardware such as the Google TPU designed especially for deep learning. Timing speculation is a promising approach to further increase the energy efficiency of DNN accelerators. Architectural exploration for timing speculation requires detailed gate-level timing simulations that can be time-consuming for large DNNs which execute millions of multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) operations. In this paper we propose FATE, a new methodology for fast and accurate timing simulations of DNN accelerators like the Google TPU. FATE proposes two novel ideas: (i) DelayNet, a DNN based timing model for MAC units; and (ii) a statistical sampling methodology that reduces the number of MAC operations for which timing simulations are performed. We show that FATE results in between 8X - 58X speed-up in timing simulations, while introducing less than 2% error in classification accuracy estimates. We demonstrate the use of FATE by comparing a conventional DNN accelerator that uses 2's complement (2C) arithmetic with one that uses signed magnitude representation (SMR). We show that that the SMR implementation provides 18% more energy savings for the same classification accuracy than 2C, a result that might be of independent interest.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD 2018 - Digest of Technical Papers
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781450359504
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 5 2018
Event37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD 2018 - San Diego, United States
Duration: Nov 5 2018Nov 8 2018

Publication series

NameIEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, Digest of Technical Papers, ICCAD
ISSN (Print)1092-3152

Other

Other37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, ICCAD 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Diego
Period11/5/1811/8/18

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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