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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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Accelerating Binarized Neural Networks via Bit-Tensor-Cores in Turing GPUs

Despite foreseeing tremendous speedups over conventional deep neural networks, the performance advantage of binarized neural networks (BNNs) has merely been showcased on general-purpose processors such as CPUs and GPUs. In fact, due to being unable to leverage bit-level-parallelism with a word-based architecture, GPUs have been criticized for extremely low utilization (1%) when executing BNNs. Consequently, the latest tensorcores in NVIDIA Turing GPUs start to experimentally support bit computation. In this work, we look into this brand new bit computation capability and characterize its unique features. We show that the stride of memory access can significantly affect performance delivery and a data-format co-design is highly desired to support the tensorcores for achieving superior performance than existing software solutions without tensorcores. We realize the tensorcore-accelerated BNN design, particularly the major functions for fully-connect and convolution layers — bit matrix multiplication and bit convolution. Evaluations on two NVIDIA Turing GPUs show that, with ResNet-18, our BTC-BNN design can process ImageNet at a rate of 5.6K images per second, 77% faster than state-of-the-art. Our BNN approach is released on https://github.com/pnnl/TCBNN.

Li, Ang↗

SwitchX : Gmin-Gmax Switching for Energy-efficient and Robust Implementation of Binarized Neural Networks on ReRAM Xbars

Memristive crossbars can efficiently implement Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs) wherein the weights are stored in high-resistance states (HRS) and low-resistance states (LRS) of the synapses. We propose SwitchX mapping of BNN weights onto ReRAM crossbars such that the impact of crossbar non-idealities, that lead to degradation in computational accuracy, are minimized. Essentially, SwitchX maps the binary weights in such a manner that a crossbar instance comprises of more HRS than LRS synapses. We find BNNs mapped onto crossbars with SwitchX to exhibit better robustness against adversarial attacks than the standard crossbar mapped BNNs, the baseline. Finally, we combine SwitchX with state-aware training (that further increases the feasibility of HRS states during weight mapping) to boost the robustness of a BNN on hardware. We find that this approach yields stronger defense against adversarial attacks than adversarial training, a state-of the-art software defense. We perform experiments on a VGG16 BNN with benchmark datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and TinyImagenet) and use Fast Gradient Sign Method (ϵ = 0.05 to 0.3) and Projected Gradient Descent (ϵ = $\frac{2}{255}$ to $\frac{32}{255}$, α = $\frac{2}{255}$) adversarial attacks. We show that SwitchX combined with state-aware training can yield upto ~35% improvements in clean accuracy and ~6–16% in adversarial accuracies against conventional BNNs. Furthermore, an important by-product of SwitchX mapping is increased crossbar power savings, owing to an increased proportion of HRS synapses, which is furthered with state-aware training. We obtain upto ~21–22% savings in crossbar power consumption for state-aware trained BNN mapped via SwitchX on 16 × 16 and 32 × 32 crossbars using the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Binary Complex Neural Network Acceleration on FPGA

Being able to learn from complex data with phase information is imperative for many signal processing applications. Today’s real-valued deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown efficiency in latent information analysis but fall short when applied to the complex domain. Deep complex networks (DCN) , in contrast, can learn from complex data, but have high computational costs; therefore, they cannot satisfy the instant decision making requirements of many deployable systems dealing with short observations or short signal bursts. Recent, Binarized Complex Neural Network (BCNN), which integrates DCNs with binarized neural networks (BNN), shows great potential in classifying complex data in real-time. In this paper, we propose a structural pruning based accelerator of BCNN, which is able to provide more than 5000 frames/s inference throughput on edge devices. The high performance comes from both the algorithm and hardware sides. On the algorithm side, we conduct structural pruning to the original BCNN models and obtain 20 × pruning rates with negligible accuracy loss; on the hardware side, we propose a novel 2D convolution operation accelerator for the binary complex neural network. Experimental results show that the proposed design works with over 90% utilization and is able to achieve the inference throughput of 5882 frames/s and 4938 frames/s for complex NIN-Net and ResNet-18 using CIFAR-10 dataset and Alveo U280 Board.

Peng, Hongwu↗

O3BNN-R: An Out-Of-Order Architecture for High-Performance and Regularized BNN Inference

Binarized Neural Networks (BNN) have drawn tremendous attention due to significantly reduced computational complexity and memory demand. They have especially shown great potential in cost- and power-restricted domains, such as IoT and smart edge-devices, where reaching a certain accuracy bar is often sufficient, and real-time is highly desired.In this work, we demonstrate that the highly-condensed BNN model can be shrunk significantly further by dynamically pruning irregular redundant edges. Based on two new observations on BNN-specific properties, an out-of-order (OoO) architecture – O3BNN-R, can curtail edge evaluation in cases where the binary output of a neuron can be determined early. Similar to Instruction-Level-Parallelism(ILP), these fine-grained, irregular, runtime pruning opportunities are traditionally presumed to be difficult to exploit. In order to increase the pruning opportunities, we also optimize the training process by adding 2 regularization items in the loss function (1) for pooling pruning and (2) for threshold pruning. We evaluate our design on an FPGA platform using three well-known networks, including VggNet-16, AlexNet for ImageNet, and a VGG-like network for Cifar-10.

Geng, Tong↗

Low power and privacy preserving sensor platform for occupancy detection

A low-cost, low-power, stand-alone sensor platform having a visible-range camera sensor, a thermopile array, a microphone, a motion sensor, and a microprocessor that is configured to perform occupancy detection and counting while preserving the privacy of occupants. The platform is programmed to extract shape/texture from images in spatial domain; motion from video in time domain; and audio features in frequency domain. Embedded binarized neural networks are used for efficient object of interest detection. The platform is also programmed with advanced fusion algorithms for multiple sensor modalities addressing dependent sensor observations. The platform may be deployed for (i) residential use in detecting occupants for autonomously controlling building systems, such as HVAC and lighting systems, to provide energy savings, (ii) security and surveillance, such as to detect loitering and surveil places of interest, (iii) analyzing customer behavior and flows, (iv) identifying high performing stores by retailers.

Velipasalar, Senem↗

Time-resolved spray characterization via unified optical flow and binarization technique

This work leverages an unsupervised machine learning and advanced image processing techniques to characterize the breakup of fuel sprays in a small-scale combustor under reacting conditions, providing valuable insights into near-nozzle flow phenomenology. The proposed methodology integrates an improved optical flow model on a convolutional neural network to extract flow vectors with a binarization technique to assess droplets’ size and shape across the region of interest. The velocimetry approach demonstrates superior performance compared to a state-of-the-art optical flow model when applied to high-speed X-ray phase contrast spray images, achieving more accurate and reliable flow predictions. Moreover, breakup processes are quantified by breakup length and sphericity in accordance with velocity estimations, allowing a more complete characterization of the flow. This study establishes a robust methodology for analyzing spray morphology and primary breakup in compact combustors, contributing valuable means of understanding and optimizing fuel spray behavior in advanced combustion systems.

42 ENGINEERING↗

BitGNN: Unlocking the Performance Potential of Binary Graph Neural Networks on GPUs

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown compelling results in many graph-based learning tasks. They are, however, time-consuming. Recent work has shown a promising direction in improving GNN speed and shrinking the size — network binarization, which binarizes network values and operations. Prior work, however, mainly focused on algorithm designs, leaving it open on how to fully materialize the performance potential. This work fills the gap by proposing techniques to best map binary GNNs and their computations to fit the nature of bit manipulations, optimizations and algorithms to maximize BSpMM kernel efficiency, and solutions to other factors influencing the end-to-end time on GPUs. Results on real-world graphs show that the proposed techniques outperform state of-the-art binary GNN implementations by 21-67× with little accuracy loss.

Chen, Jou-An↗

GAAF: Searching Activation Functions for Binary Neural Networks Through Genetic Algorithm

Binary neural networks (BNNs) show promising utilization in cost and power-restricted domains such as edge devices and mobile systems. This is due to its significantly less computation and storage demand, but at the cost of degraded performance. To close the accuracy gap, in this paper we propose to add a complementary activation function (AF) ahead of the sign based binarization, and rely on the genetic algorithm (GA) to automatically search for the ideal AFs. These AFs can help extract extra information from the input data in the forward pass, while allowing improved gradient approximation in the backward pass. Fifteen novel AFs are identified through our GA-based search, while most of them show improved performance (up to 2.54% on ImageNet) when testing on different datasets and network models. Interestingly, periodic functions are identified as a key component for most of the discovered AFs, which rarely exist in human designed AFs. Our method offers a novel approach for designing general and application-specific BNN architecture.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗