COMPILER FOR A TRACE-BASED DEEP NEURAL NETWORK ACCELERATOR

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are the algorithm of choice for various applications that require modeling large datasets, such as image classification, object detection and natural language processing. DNNs present highly parallel workloads
that lead to the need of custom hardware accelerators. Deep Learning (DL) models specialized on different tasks require a programmable custom hardware, and a compiler to efficiently translate various DNNs into an efficient dataflow to be executed on the accelerator. Given a DNN oriented custom instructions set, various compilation phases are needed to generate efficient code and maintain generality to support
many models. Different compilation phases need to have different levels of hardware awareness so that it exploits the hardware’s full potential, while abiding with the hardware constraints. The goal of this work is to present a compiler workflow and its hardware aware optimization passes for a custom DNN hardware accelerator. The compiler uses model definition files created from popular frameworks to generate custom instructions. Different levels of hardware aware code optimizations are applied to improve performance and data reuse. The software also exposes an interface to run the accelerator implemented on various FPGA platforms, proving an end-to-end solution.