SARA achieves close to perfect performance scaling on a recently proposed RDA—Plasticine.
Yaqi Zhang, Nathan Zhang, Tian Zhao, Matt Vilim, Muhammad Shahbaz, Kunle Olukotun (Stanford)
Abstract—”The need for speed in modern data-intensive workloads and the rise of “dark silicon” in the semiconductor industry are pushing for larger, faster, and more energy and areaefficient architectures, such as Reconfigurable Dataflow Accelerators (RDAs). Nevertheless, challenges remain in developing mechanisms to effectively utilize the compute power of these large-scale RDAs. To address these challenges, we present SARA, a compiler that employs a novel mapping strategy to efficiently utilize largescale RDAs. Starting from a single-threaded imperative abstraction, SARA spatially maps a program onto RDA’s distributed resources, exploiting dataflow parallelism within and across hyperblocks to saturate the compute throughput of an RDA. SARA introduces (a) compiler-managed memory consistency (CMMC), a control paradigm that hierarchically pipelines a nested and data-dependent control-flow graph onto a dataflow architecture, and (b) a compilation flow that decomposes the program graph across distributed heterogeneous resources to hide low-level RDA constraints from programmers. Our evaluation shows that SARA achieves close to perfect performance scaling on a recently proposed RDA—Plasticine. Over a mix of deep-learning, graphprocessing, and streaming applications, SARA achieves a 1.9× geo-mean speedup over a Tesla V100 GPU using only 12% of the silicon area.”
Find technical paper here.
Technical paper presented at 2021 ACM/IEEE 48th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture.
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