Title
DeftNN: addressing bottlenecks for DNN execution on GPUs via synapse vector elimination and near-compute data fission.
Abstract
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are key computational building blocks for emerging classes of web services that interact in real time with users via voice, images and video inputs. Although GPUs have gained popularity as a key accelerator platform for deep learning workloads, the increasing demand for DNN computation leaves a significant gap between the compute capabilities of GPU-enabled datacenters and the compute needed to service demand. The state-of-the-art techniques to improve DNN performance have significant limitations in bridging the gap on real systems. Current network pruning techniques remove computation, but the resulting networks map poorly to GPU architectures, yielding no performance benefit or even slowdowns. Meanwhile, current bandwidth optimization techniques focus on reducing off-chip bandwidth while overlooking on-chip bandwidth, a key DNN bottleneck. To address these limitations, this work introduces DeftNN, a GPU DNN execution framework that targets the key architectural bottlenecks of DNNs on GPUs to automatically and transparently improve execution performance. DeftNN is composed of two novel optimization techniques - (1) synapse vector elimination, a technique that identifies non-contributing synapses in the DNN and carefully transforms data and removes the computation and data movement of these synapses while fully utilizing the GPU to improve performance, and (2) near-compute data fission, a mechanism for scaling down the on-chip data movement requirements within DNN computations. Our evaluation of DeftNN spans 6 state-of-the-art DNNs. By applying both optimizations in concert, DeftNN is able to achieve an average speedup of 2.1X on real GPU hardware. We also introduce a small additional hardware unit per GPU core to facilitate efficient data fission operations, increasing the speedup achieved by DeftNN to 2.6X.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3123939.3123970
MICRO-50: The 50th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture Cambridge Massachusetts October, 2017
Keywords
Field
DocType
GPU Architecture, Deep Neural Networks, Memory Bandwidth, Performance Optimization
Bottleneck,Computing Methodologies,Memory bandwidth,Computer science,Parallel computing,Real-time computing,Bandwidth (signal processing),Artificial intelligence,Deep learning,Web service,Computation,Speedup
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1072-4451
978-1-4503-4952-9
18
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.65
43
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Parker Hill1392.70
Animesh Jain2231.06
Mason Hill3180.65
Babak Zamirai4583.64
Chang-Hong Hsu51546.69
Michael A. Laurenzano646721.23
Scott Mahlke74811312.08
Lingjia Tang8122946.41
Jason Mars9613.98