MEADOW: Memory-efficient Dataflow and Data Packing for Low Power Edge LLMs

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Hauptverfasser: Moitra, Abhishek, Ghosh, Arkapravo, Agarwal, Shrey, Amarnath, Aporva, Swaminathan, Karthik, Panda, Priyadarshini
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Moitra, Abhishek
Ghosh, Arkapravo
Agarwal, Shrey
Amarnath, Aporva
Swaminathan, Karthik
Panda, Priyadarshini
author_facet Moitra, Abhishek
Ghosh, Arkapravo
Agarwal, Shrey
Amarnath, Aporva
Swaminathan, Karthik
Panda, Priyadarshini
contents The computational and memory challenges of large language models (LLMs) have sparked several optimization approaches towards their efficient implementation. While prior LLM-targeted quantization, and prior works on sparse acceleration have significantly mitigated the memory and computation bottleneck, they do so assuming high power platforms such as GPUs and server-class FPGAs with large off-chip memory bandwidths and employ a generalized matrix multiplication (GEMM) execution of all the layers in the decoder. In such a GEMM-based execution, data is fetched from an off-chip memory, computed and stored back. However, at reduced off-chip memory capacities, as is the case with low-power edge devices, this implementation strategy significantly increases the attention computation latency owing to the repeated storage and fetch of large intermediate tokens to and from the off-chip memory. Moreover, fetching the weight matrices from a bandwidth constrained memory further aggravates the memory bottleneck problem. To this end, we introduce MEADOW, a framework that significantly reduces the off-chip memory access for LLMs with a novel token-parallel head-sequential (TPHS) dataflow. Additionally, MEADOW applies weight packing that performs loss-less decomposition of large weight matrices to their unique elements thereby, reducing the enormous weight fetch latency. MEADOW demonstrates 1.5x and 2.5x lower decode and prefill latency, respectively, compared to a GEMM-based LLM implementation on the low power Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA platform that consumes less than 10W. Additionally, MEADOW achieves an end-to-end latency improvement of over 40%, compared to prior LLM optimization works.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_11663
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MEADOW: Memory-efficient Dataflow and Data Packing for Low Power Edge LLMs
Moitra, Abhishek
Ghosh, Arkapravo
Agarwal, Shrey
Amarnath, Aporva
Swaminathan, Karthik
Panda, Priyadarshini
Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The computational and memory challenges of large language models (LLMs) have sparked several optimization approaches towards their efficient implementation. While prior LLM-targeted quantization, and prior works on sparse acceleration have significantly mitigated the memory and computation bottleneck, they do so assuming high power platforms such as GPUs and server-class FPGAs with large off-chip memory bandwidths and employ a generalized matrix multiplication (GEMM) execution of all the layers in the decoder. In such a GEMM-based execution, data is fetched from an off-chip memory, computed and stored back. However, at reduced off-chip memory capacities, as is the case with low-power edge devices, this implementation strategy significantly increases the attention computation latency owing to the repeated storage and fetch of large intermediate tokens to and from the off-chip memory. Moreover, fetching the weight matrices from a bandwidth constrained memory further aggravates the memory bottleneck problem. To this end, we introduce MEADOW, a framework that significantly reduces the off-chip memory access for LLMs with a novel token-parallel head-sequential (TPHS) dataflow. Additionally, MEADOW applies weight packing that performs loss-less decomposition of large weight matrices to their unique elements thereby, reducing the enormous weight fetch latency. MEADOW demonstrates 1.5x and 2.5x lower decode and prefill latency, respectively, compared to a GEMM-based LLM implementation on the low power Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA platform that consumes less than 10W. Additionally, MEADOW achieves an end-to-end latency improvement of over 40%, compared to prior LLM optimization works.
title MEADOW: Memory-efficient Dataflow and Data Packing for Low Power Edge LLMs
topic Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11663