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Scientific Article details

Title Fine-grained Hardware Acceleration for Efficient Batteryless Intermittent Inference on the Edge
ID_Doc 61901
Authors Caronti, L; Akhunov, K; Nardello, M; Yildirim, KS; Brunelli, D
Title Fine-grained Hardware Acceleration for Efficient Batteryless Intermittent Inference on the Edge
Year 2023
Published Acm Transactions On Embedded Computing Systems, 22.0, 5
DOI 10.1145/3608475
Abstract Backing up the intermediate results of hardware-accelerated deep inference is crucial to ensure the progress of execution on batteryless computing platforms. However, hardware accelerators in low-power AI platforms only support the one-shot atomic execution of one neural network inference without any backups. This article introduces a new toolchain for MAX78000, which is a brand-new microcontroller with a hardware-based convolutional neural network (CNN) accelerator. Our toolchain converts any MAX78000-compatible neural network into an intermittently executable form. The toolchain enables finer checkpoint granularity on the MAX78000 CNN accelerator, allowing for backups of any intermediate neural network layer output. Based on the layer-by-layer CNN execution, we propose a new backup technique that performs only necessary (urgent) checkpoints. The method involves the batteryless system switching to ultra-low-power mode while charging, saving intermediate results only when input power is lower than ultra-low-power mode energy consumption. By avoiding unnecessary memory transfer, the proposed solution increases the inference throughput by 1.9x for simulation and by 1.2x for real-world setup compared to the coarse-grained baseline execution.
Author Keywords Intermittent computing; convolutional neural networks; edge computing; energy harvesting; hardware accelerator; checkpointing
Index Keywords Index Keywords
Document Type Other
Open Access Open Access
Source Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED)
EID WOS:001074281500004
WoS Category Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture; Computer Science, Software Engineering
Research Area Computer Science
PDF https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3608475
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