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Main Authors: Raja, Shiva, Demirkiran, Cansu, Sarkar, Aakash, Popovic, Milos, Joshi, Ajay
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21394
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author Raja, Shiva
Demirkiran, Cansu
Sarkar, Aakash
Popovic, Milos
Joshi, Ajay
author_facet Raja, Shiva
Demirkiran, Cansu
Sarkar, Aakash
Popovic, Milos
Joshi, Ajay
contents Sequence modeling is crucial for AI to understand temporal data and detect complex time-dependent patterns. While recurrent neural networks (RNNs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and Transformers have advanced in capturing long-range dependencies, they struggle with achieving high accuracy with very long sequences due to limited memory retention (fixed context window). State-Space Models (SSMs) leverage exponentially decaying memory enabling lengthy context window and so they process very long data sequences more efficiently than recurrent and Transformer-based models. Unlike traditional neural models like CNNs and RNNs, SSM-based models require solving differential equations through continuous integration, making training and inference both compute- and memory-intensive on conventional CPUs and GPUs. In this paper we introduce a specialized hardware accelerator, EpochCore, for accelerating SSMs. EpochCore is based on systolic arrays (SAs) and is designed to enhance the energy efficiency and throughput of inference of SSM-based models for long-range sequence tasks. Within the SA, we propose a versatile processing element (PE) called LIMA-PE to perform traditional and specialized MAC operations to support traditional DNNs and SSMs. To complement the EpochCore microarchitecture, we propose a novel dataflow, ProDF, which enables highly efficient execution of SSM-based models. By leveraging the LIMA-PE microarchitecture and ProDF, EpochCore achieves on average 2000x improvement in performance on LRA datasets compared to a GPU and 250x gains in performance and 45x improvement in energy efficiency, over traditional SA-based accelerators (TPU).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_21394
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Systolic Array-based Accelerator for Structured State-Space Models
Raja, Shiva
Demirkiran, Cansu
Sarkar, Aakash
Popovic, Milos
Joshi, Ajay
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
Sequence modeling is crucial for AI to understand temporal data and detect complex time-dependent patterns. While recurrent neural networks (RNNs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and Transformers have advanced in capturing long-range dependencies, they struggle with achieving high accuracy with very long sequences due to limited memory retention (fixed context window). State-Space Models (SSMs) leverage exponentially decaying memory enabling lengthy context window and so they process very long data sequences more efficiently than recurrent and Transformer-based models. Unlike traditional neural models like CNNs and RNNs, SSM-based models require solving differential equations through continuous integration, making training and inference both compute- and memory-intensive on conventional CPUs and GPUs. In this paper we introduce a specialized hardware accelerator, EpochCore, for accelerating SSMs. EpochCore is based on systolic arrays (SAs) and is designed to enhance the energy efficiency and throughput of inference of SSM-based models for long-range sequence tasks. Within the SA, we propose a versatile processing element (PE) called LIMA-PE to perform traditional and specialized MAC operations to support traditional DNNs and SSMs. To complement the EpochCore microarchitecture, we propose a novel dataflow, ProDF, which enables highly efficient execution of SSM-based models. By leveraging the LIMA-PE microarchitecture and ProDF, EpochCore achieves on average 2000x improvement in performance on LRA datasets compared to a GPU and 250x gains in performance and 45x improvement in energy efficiency, over traditional SA-based accelerators (TPU).
title Systolic Array-based Accelerator for Structured State-Space Models
topic Machine Learning
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21394