PUMA: A Programmable Ultra-efficient Memristor-based Accelerator for Machine Learning Inference

Aayush Ankit, Izzat El Hajj, Sai Rahul Chalamalasetti, Geoffrey Ndu, Martin Foltin, R. Stanley Williams, Paolo Faraboschi, Wen Mei Hwu, John Paul Strachan, Kaushik Roy, Dejan S. Milojicic

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

Abstract

Memristor crossbars are circuits capable of performing analog matrix-vector multiplications, overcoming the fundamental energy efficiency limitations of digital logic. They have been shown to be effective in special-purpose accelerators for a limited set of neural network applications. We present the Programmable Ultra-efficient Memristorbased Accelerator (PUMA) which enhances memristor crossbars with general purpose execution units to enable the acceleration of a wide variety of Machine Learning (ML) inference workloads. PUMA's microarchitecture techniques exposed through a specialized Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) retain the efficiency of in-memory computing and analog circuitry, without compromising programmability. We also present the PUMA compiler which translates high-level code to PUMA ISA. The compiler partitions the computational graph and optimizes instruction scheduling and register allocation to generate code for large and complex workloads to run on thousands of spatial cores. We have developed a detailed architecture simulator that incorporates the functionality, timing, and power models of PUMA's components to evaluate performance and energy consumption. A PUMA accelerator running at 1 GHz can reach area and power efficiency of 577 GOPS/s/mm2 and 837 GOPS/s/W, respectively. Our evaluation of diverse ML applications from image recognition, machine translation, and language modelling (5M-800M synapses) shows that PUMA achieves up to 2,446× energy and 66× latency improvement for inference compared to state-of-the-art GPUs. Compared to an application-specific memristor-based accelerator, PUMA incurs small energy overheads at similar inference latency and added programmability.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationASPLOS 2019 - 24th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages715-731
Number of pages17
ISBN (Electronic)9781450362405
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 4 2019
Event24th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2019 - Providence, United States
Duration: Apr 13 2019Apr 17 2019

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems - ASPLOS

Conference

Conference24th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityProvidence
Period4/13/194/17/19

Keywords

  • accelerators
  • machine learning
  • memristors
  • neural networks

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Information Systems
  • Hardware and Architecture

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