Accelerating CNN Algorithm with Fine-Grained Dataflow Architectures

Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) is a hot and state-of-the-art algorithm which is widely used in applications such as face recognition, intelligent monitoring, image recognition and text recognition. Because of its high computational complexity, many efficient hardware accelerators have been proposed to exploit high degree of parallel processing for CNN. However, accelerators which are implemented on FPGAs and ASICs usually sacrifice generality for higher performance and lower power consumption. Other accelerators, such as GPUs, are general enough, but they lead to higher power consumption. Fine-grained dataflow architectures, which break conventional Von Neumann architectures, show natural advantages in processing CNN-like algorithms with high computational efficiency and low power consumption. At the same time, it remains broadly applicable and adaptable. In this paper, we propose a scheme for implementing and optimizing CNN on fine-grained dataflow architecture based accelerators. The experiment results reveal that by using our scheme, the performance of AlexNet running on the dataflow accelerator is 3.11× higher than that on NVIDIA Tesla K80, and the power consumption of our hardware is 8.52× lower than that of K80.