The two largest barriers to adoption of FPGA platforms for HPC applications are the difficulty of programming FPGAs and the performance gap when compared to GPUs. To address the first barrier, new ecosystems like Intel oneAPI, and Xilinx Vitis HLS aim to improve programmability for FPGA platforms. From a performance aspect, FPGAs trade off lower compute frequencies for more customized hardware acceleration and power efficiency when compared to GPUs. The performance for memory-bound applications on recent GPU platforms like NVIDIA’s H100 and AMD’s MI210 has also improved due to the inclusion of high-bandwidth memories (HBM), and newer FPGA platforms are also starting to include HBM in addition to traditional DRAM.
To understand the current state-of-the-art and performance differences between FPGAs and GPUs, we consider realized memory bandwidth for recent FPGA and GPU platforms. We utilize a custom STREAM benchmark to evaluate two Intel FPGA platforms, the Stratix 10 SX PAC and Bittware 520N-MX, two AMD/Xilinx FPGA platforms, the Alveo U250 and Alveo U280, as well as GPU platforms from NVIDIA and AMD. We also extract power measurements and estimate memory bandwidth per Watt ((GB/s)/W) on these platforms to evaluate how FPGAs compare against GPU execution. While the GPUs far exceed the FPGAs in raw performance, the HBM equipped FPGAs demonstrate a competitive performance-power balance for larger data sizes that can be easily implemented with oneAPI and Vitis HLS kernels. These findings suggest a potential sweet spot for this emerging FPGA ecosystem to serve bandwidth limited applications in an energy-efficient fashion.
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Optimized FPGA-based Deep Learning Accelerator for Sparse CNN using High Bandwidth Memory
Large Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are often pruned and compressed to reduce the amount of parameters and memory requirement. However, the resulting irregularity in the sparse data makes it difficult for FPGA accelerators that contains systolic arrays of Multiply-and-Accumulate (MAC) units, such as Intel’s FPGA-based Deep Learning Accelerator (DLA), to achieve their maximum potential. Moreover, FPGAs with low-bandwidth off-chip memory could not satisfy the memory bandwidth requirement for sparse matrix computation. In this paper, we present 1) a sparse matrix packing technique that condenses sparse inputs and filters before feeding them into the systolic array of MAC units in the Intel DLA, and 2) a customization of the Intel DLA which allows the FPGA to efficiently utilize a high bandwidth memory (HBM2) integrated in the same package. For end-to-end inference with randomly pruned ResNet-50/MobileNet CNN models, our experiments demonstrate 2.7x/3x performance improvement compared to an FPGA with DDR4, 2.2x/2.1x speedup against a server-class Intel SkyLake CPU, and comparable performance with 1.7x/2x power efficiency gain as compared to an NVidia V100 GPU.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1738420
- PAR ID:
- 10289017
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 157 to 164
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/FCCM51124.2021.00026
