Sorted Weight Sectioning for Energy-Efficient Unstructured Sparse DNNs on Compute-in-Memory Crossbars

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Farias, Matheus, Kung, H. T.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Farias, Matheus
Kung, H. T.
author_facet Farias, Matheus
Kung, H. T.
contents We introduce $\textit{sorted weight sectioning}$ (SWS): a weight allocation algorithm that places sorted deep neural network (DNN) weight sections on bit-sliced compute-in-memory (CIM) crossbars to reduce analog-to-digital converter (ADC) energy consumption. Data conversions are the most energy-intensive process in crossbar operation. SWS effectively reduces this cost leveraging (1) small weights and (2) zero weights (weight sparsity). DNN weights follow bell-shaped distributions, with most weights near zero. Using SWS, we only need low-order crossbar columns for sections with low-magnitude weights. This reduces the quantity and resolution of ADCs used, exponentially decreasing ADC energy costs without significantly degrading DNN accuracy. Unstructured sparsification further sharpens the weight distribution with small accuracy loss. However, it presents challenges in hardware tracking of zeros: we cannot switch zero rows to other layer weights in unsorted crossbars without index matching. SWS efficiently addresses unstructured sparse models using offline remapping of zeros into earlier sections, which reveals full sparsity potential and maximizes energy efficiency. Our method reduces ADC energy use by 89.5% on unstructured sparse BERT models. Overall, this paper introduces a novel algorithm to promote energy-efficient CIM crossbars for unstructured sparse DNN workloads.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_11298
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sorted Weight Sectioning for Energy-Efficient Unstructured Sparse DNNs on Compute-in-Memory Crossbars
Farias, Matheus
Kung, H. T.
Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
Machine Learning
We introduce $\textit{sorted weight sectioning}$ (SWS): a weight allocation algorithm that places sorted deep neural network (DNN) weight sections on bit-sliced compute-in-memory (CIM) crossbars to reduce analog-to-digital converter (ADC) energy consumption. Data conversions are the most energy-intensive process in crossbar operation. SWS effectively reduces this cost leveraging (1) small weights and (2) zero weights (weight sparsity). DNN weights follow bell-shaped distributions, with most weights near zero. Using SWS, we only need low-order crossbar columns for sections with low-magnitude weights. This reduces the quantity and resolution of ADCs used, exponentially decreasing ADC energy costs without significantly degrading DNN accuracy. Unstructured sparsification further sharpens the weight distribution with small accuracy loss. However, it presents challenges in hardware tracking of zeros: we cannot switch zero rows to other layer weights in unsorted crossbars without index matching. SWS efficiently addresses unstructured sparse models using offline remapping of zeros into earlier sections, which reveals full sparsity potential and maximizes energy efficiency. Our method reduces ADC energy use by 89.5% on unstructured sparse BERT models. Overall, this paper introduces a novel algorithm to promote energy-efficient CIM crossbars for unstructured sparse DNN workloads.
title Sorted Weight Sectioning for Energy-Efficient Unstructured Sparse DNNs on Compute-in-Memory Crossbars
topic Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Emerging Technologies
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11298