Abstract
In this software, we have realized a GPU CUDA implementation for accelerating binarized neural network. The software was tested on MNIST, CIFAR10, and ImageNet-2012 datasets using MLP, VGG and AlexNet neural network models. We tested on NVIDA Tesla P100 and V100 GPUs. We have achieved over 1000 times speedups compared with TensorFlow & cuDNN. This software package has been developed for more than two years. Binarized neural networks (or BNNs) promise tremendous performance improvement over traditional DNNs through simplified bit-level computation and significantly reduced memory access/storage cost. In addition, it has advantages of low-cost, low-energy, and high-robustness, showing great potential in resources-constrained, volatile, and latency-critical applications, which are critical for future HPC, cloud, and edge applications. However, the promised significant performance gain of BNN inference has never been fully demonstrated on general-purpose processors, particularly on GPUs, due to: (i) the challenge of extracting and leveraging sufficient fine-grained bit-level-parallelism to saturate GPU cores when the batch size is small; (ii) the fundamental design conflict between bit-based BNN algorithm and word-based architecture; and (iii) architecture and performance unfriendly to BNN network design. To address (i) and (ii), we propose a binarized-soft-tensor-core as a software-hardware codesign approach to construct bit-manipulation capability for modern GPUs and thereby effectively harvest bit-level-parallelism (BLP). To tackle (iii), we propose intra- and inter-layer fusion techniques so that the entire BNN inference execution can be packed into a single GPU kernel, and so avoid the high-cost of frequent launching and releasing. \red{Experiments show that our Singular-Binarized-Neural-Network (SBNN) design can achieve over 1000x speedup for raw inference latency over the state-of-the-art full-precision BNN inference for AlexNet on GPUs. Comparisons with CPU, GPU, FPGA and Xeon-Phi demonstrate the effectiveness of our design.
Exploratory License
Eligible for exploratory license
Market Sector
Data Sciences