Allo: A Programming Model for Composable Accelerator Design

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Chen, Hongzheng, Zhang, Niansong, Xiang, Shaojie, Zeng, Zhichen, Dai, Mengjia, Zhang, Zhiru
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866911829624619008
author Chen, Hongzheng
Zhang, Niansong
Xiang, Shaojie
Zeng, Zhichen
Dai, Mengjia
Zhang, Zhiru
author_facet Chen, Hongzheng
Zhang, Niansong
Xiang, Shaojie
Zeng, Zhichen
Dai, Mengjia
Zhang, Zhiru
contents Special-purpose hardware accelerators are increasingly pivotal for sustaining performance improvements in emerging applications, especially as the benefits of technology scaling continue to diminish. However, designers currently lack effective tools and methodologies to construct complex, high-performance accelerator architectures in a productive manner. Existing high-level synthesis (HLS) tools often require intrusive source-level changes to attain satisfactory quality of results. Despite the introduction of several new accelerator design languages (ADLs) aiming to enhance or replace HLS, their advantages are more evident in relatively simple applications with a single kernel. Existing ADLs prove less effective for realistic hierarchical designs with multiple kernels, even if the design hierarchy is flattened. In this paper, we introduce Allo, a composable programming model for efficient spatial accelerator design. Allo decouples hardware customizations, including compute, memory, communication, and data type from algorithm specification, and encapsulates them as a set of customization primitives. Allo preserves the hierarchical structure of an input program by combining customizations from different functions in a bottom-up, type-safe manner. This approach facilitates holistic optimizations that span across function boundaries. We conduct comprehensive experiments on commonly-used HLS benchmarks and several realistic deep learning models. Our evaluation shows that Allo can outperform state-of-the-art HLS tools and ADLs on all test cases in the PolyBench. For the GPT2 model, the inference latency of the Allo generated accelerator is 1.7x faster than the NVIDIA A100 GPU with 5.4x higher energy efficiency, demonstrating the capability of Allo to handle large-scale designs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_04815
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Allo: A Programming Model for Composable Accelerator Design
Chen, Hongzheng
Zhang, Niansong
Xiang, Shaojie
Zeng, Zhichen
Dai, Mengjia
Zhang, Zhiru
Programming Languages
Hardware Architecture
Machine Learning
Special-purpose hardware accelerators are increasingly pivotal for sustaining performance improvements in emerging applications, especially as the benefits of technology scaling continue to diminish. However, designers currently lack effective tools and methodologies to construct complex, high-performance accelerator architectures in a productive manner. Existing high-level synthesis (HLS) tools often require intrusive source-level changes to attain satisfactory quality of results. Despite the introduction of several new accelerator design languages (ADLs) aiming to enhance or replace HLS, their advantages are more evident in relatively simple applications with a single kernel. Existing ADLs prove less effective for realistic hierarchical designs with multiple kernels, even if the design hierarchy is flattened. In this paper, we introduce Allo, a composable programming model for efficient spatial accelerator design. Allo decouples hardware customizations, including compute, memory, communication, and data type from algorithm specification, and encapsulates them as a set of customization primitives. Allo preserves the hierarchical structure of an input program by combining customizations from different functions in a bottom-up, type-safe manner. This approach facilitates holistic optimizations that span across function boundaries. We conduct comprehensive experiments on commonly-used HLS benchmarks and several realistic deep learning models. Our evaluation shows that Allo can outperform state-of-the-art HLS tools and ADLs on all test cases in the PolyBench. For the GPT2 model, the inference latency of the Allo generated accelerator is 1.7x faster than the NVIDIA A100 GPU with 5.4x higher energy efficiency, demonstrating the capability of Allo to handle large-scale designs.
title Allo: A Programming Model for Composable Accelerator Design
topic Programming Languages
Hardware Architecture
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04815