Title
A Quality-assured Approximate Hardware Accelerators–based on Machine Learning and Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration
Abstract
AbstractMachine learning is widely used these days to extract meaningful information out of the Zettabytes of sensors data collected daily. All applications require analyzing and understanding the data to identify trends, e.g., surveillance, exhibit some error tolerance. Approximate computing has emerged as an energy-efficient design paradigm aiming to take advantage of the intrinsic error resilience in a wide set of error-tolerant applications. Thus, inexact results could reduce power consumption, delay, area, and execution time. To increase the energy-efficiency of machine learning on FPGA, we consider approximation at the hardware level, e.g., approximate multipliers. However, errors in approximate computing heavily depend on the application, the applied inputs, and user preferences. However, dynamic partial reconfiguration has been introduced, as a key differentiating capability in recent FPGAs, to significantly reduce design area, power consumption, and reconfiguration time by adaptively changing a selective part of the FPGA design without interrupting the remaining system. Thus, integrating “Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration” (DPR) with “Approximate Computing” (AC) will significantly ameliorate the efficiency of FPGA-based design approximation. In this article, we propose hardware-efficient quality-controlled approximate accelerators, which are suitable to be implemented in FPGA-based machine learning algorithms as well as any error-resilient applications. Experimental results using three case studies of image blending, audio blending, and image filtering applications demonstrate that the proposed adaptive approximate accelerator satisfies the required quality with an accuracy of 81.82%, 80.4%, and 89.4%, respectively. On average, the partial bitstream was found to be 28.6\(\) smaller than the full bitstream.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3462329
ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Approximate computing, approximate hardware accelerator, decision tree, input-aware approximation, dynamic partial reconfiguration, adaptive design, FPGA
Journal
17
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1550-4832
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mahmoud Masadeh193.58
Yassmeen Elderhalli223.43
Osman Hasan3286.64
Sofiène Tahar4915110.41