A Full-stack Search Technique For Domain Optimized Deep Learning Accelerators
Dan Zhang, Safeen Huda, Ebrahim Songhori, Kartik Prabhu, Quoc Le, Anna Goldie, Azalia Mirhoseini . Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems 2021 – 44 citations
The rapidly-changing deep learning landscape presents a unique opportunity for building inference accelerators optimized for specific datacenter-scale workloads. We propose Full-stack Accelerator Search Technique (FAST), a hardware accelerator search framework that defines a broad optimization environment covering key design decisions within the hardware-software stack, including hardware datapath, software scheduling, and compiler passes such as operation fusion and tensor padding. In this paper, we analyze bottlenecks in state-of-the-art vision and natural language processing (NLP) models, including EfficientNet and BERT, and use FAST to design accelerators capable of addressing these bottlenecks. FAST-generated accelerators optimized for single workloads improve Perf/TDP by 3.7x on average across all benchmarks compared to TPU-v3. A FAST-generated accelerator optimized for serving a suite of workloads improves Perf/TDP by 2.4x on average compared to TPU-v3. Our return on investment analysis shows that FAST-generated accelerators can potentially be practical for moderate-sized datacenter deployments.