Title
FlexScore: Quantifying Flexibility
Abstract
Domain-specific accelerators achieve high performance and efficiency at the cost of reduced adaptivity to functionality changes, i.e., flexibility. Balancing efficiency and flexibility is important for accelerator designing. There is not, however, a commonly accepted metric for flexibility. We propose <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">FlexScore</i> as a flexibility metric based on the relationship between flexibility and goodness metrics, such as performance. FlexScore does not incorporate domain-specific or hardware-specific knowledge and, thus, is applicable to general accelerator design. We present FlexScores of three well-known DNN accelerators and observe that there is 45 percent FlexScore difference among them and show how architectural changes could improve FlexScore by up to 21 percent, demonstrating the usefulness of FlexScore in evaluating, comparing, and trading-off different architectures.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/LCA.2021.3076413
IEEE Computer Architecture Letters
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Flexibility,programmability,domain-specific accelerators,design methodology
Journal
20
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1556-6056
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tian Tan132.11
Eriko Nurvitadhi239933.08
Aravind Dasu3104.47
Martin Langhammer410420.22
Derek Chiou571848.97