MICSim: A Modular Simulator for Mixed-signal Compute-in-Memory based AI Accelerator

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wang, Cong, Chen, Zeming, Huang, Shanshi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Wang, Cong
Chen, Zeming
Huang, Shanshi
author_facet Wang, Cong
Chen, Zeming
Huang, Shanshi
contents This work introduces MICSim, an open-source, pre-circuit simulator designed for early-stage evaluation of chip-level software performance and hardware overhead of mixed-signal compute-in-memory (CIM) accelerators. MICSim features a modular design, allowing easy multi-level co-design and design space exploration. Modularized from the state-of-the-art CIM simulator NeuroSim, MICSim provides a highly configurable simulation framework supporting multiple quantization algorithms, diverse circuit/architecture designs, and different memory devices. This modular approach also allows MICSim to be effectively extended to accommodate new designs. MICSim natively supports evaluating accelerators' software and hardware performance for CNNs and Transformers in Python, leveraging the popular PyTorch and HuggingFace Transformers frameworks. These capabilities make MICSim highly adaptive when simulating different networks and user-friendly. This work demonstrates that MICSim can easily be combined with optimization strategies to perform design space exploration and used for chip-level Transformers CIM accelerators evaluation. Also, MICSim can achieve a 9x - 32x speedup of NeuroSim through a statistic-based average mode proposed by this work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_14838
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MICSim: A Modular Simulator for Mixed-signal Compute-in-Memory based AI Accelerator
Wang, Cong
Chen, Zeming
Huang, Shanshi
Artificial Intelligence
Hardware Architecture
This work introduces MICSim, an open-source, pre-circuit simulator designed for early-stage evaluation of chip-level software performance and hardware overhead of mixed-signal compute-in-memory (CIM) accelerators. MICSim features a modular design, allowing easy multi-level co-design and design space exploration. Modularized from the state-of-the-art CIM simulator NeuroSim, MICSim provides a highly configurable simulation framework supporting multiple quantization algorithms, diverse circuit/architecture designs, and different memory devices. This modular approach also allows MICSim to be effectively extended to accommodate new designs. MICSim natively supports evaluating accelerators' software and hardware performance for CNNs and Transformers in Python, leveraging the popular PyTorch and HuggingFace Transformers frameworks. These capabilities make MICSim highly adaptive when simulating different networks and user-friendly. This work demonstrates that MICSim can easily be combined with optimization strategies to perform design space exploration and used for chip-level Transformers CIM accelerators evaluation. Also, MICSim can achieve a 9x - 32x speedup of NeuroSim through a statistic-based average mode proposed by this work.
title MICSim: A Modular Simulator for Mixed-signal Compute-in-Memory based AI Accelerator
topic Artificial Intelligence
Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14838