Hybrid Photonic-digital Accelerator for Attention Mechanism
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866917897223274496 |
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| author | Li, Huize Chen, Dan Mitra, Tulika |
| author_facet | Li, Huize Chen, Dan Mitra, Tulika |
| contents | The wide adoption and substantial computational resource requirements of attention-based Transformers have spurred the demand for efficient hardware accelerators. Unlike digital-based accelerators, there is growing interest in exploring photonics due to its high energy efficiency and ultra-fast processing speeds. However, the significant signal conversion overhead limits the performance of photonic-based accelerators. In this work, we propose HyAtten, a photonic-based attention accelerator with minimize signal conversion overhead. HyAtten incorporates a signal comparator to classify signals into two categories based on whether they can be processed by low-resolution converters. HyAtten integrates low-resolution converters to process all low-resolution signals, thereby boosting the parallelism of photonic computing. For signals requiring high-resolution conversion, HyAtten uses digital circuits instead of signal converters to reduce area and latency overhead. Compared to state-of-the-art photonic-based Transformer accelerator, HyAtten achieves 9.8X performance/area and 2.2X energy-efficiency/area improvement. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_11286 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Hybrid Photonic-digital Accelerator for Attention Mechanism Li, Huize Chen, Dan Mitra, Tulika Hardware Architecture The wide adoption and substantial computational resource requirements of attention-based Transformers have spurred the demand for efficient hardware accelerators. Unlike digital-based accelerators, there is growing interest in exploring photonics due to its high energy efficiency and ultra-fast processing speeds. However, the significant signal conversion overhead limits the performance of photonic-based accelerators. In this work, we propose HyAtten, a photonic-based attention accelerator with minimize signal conversion overhead. HyAtten incorporates a signal comparator to classify signals into two categories based on whether they can be processed by low-resolution converters. HyAtten integrates low-resolution converters to process all low-resolution signals, thereby boosting the parallelism of photonic computing. For signals requiring high-resolution conversion, HyAtten uses digital circuits instead of signal converters to reduce area and latency overhead. Compared to state-of-the-art photonic-based Transformer accelerator, HyAtten achieves 9.8X performance/area and 2.2X energy-efficiency/area improvement. |
| title | Hybrid Photonic-digital Accelerator for Attention Mechanism |
| topic | Hardware Architecture |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11286 |