Difference between revisions of "Investigating the Cost of Special-Case Handling in Low-Precision Floating-Point Dot Product Units (1S)"
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Revision as of 18:18, 3 November 2023
Contents
Overview
Status: In Progress
- Student: Maurus Item
- Type: Semester Thesis
- Professor: Prof. Dr. L. Benini
- Supervisors:
Introduction
Low-precision floating-point (FP) formats are getting more and more traction in the context of neural network (NN) training. Employing low-precision formats, such as 8-bit FP data types, reduce the model's memory footprint and open new opportunities to increase the system's energy efficiency.
A low-precision FP dot product unit was recently developed at IIS [1], [2]. The module computes 8 or 16-bit dot products and accumulates the result in larger precision. It has been designed following the standard IEEE-754 directives. However, supporting all the special cases can be costly in hardware and some of these special cases might be unnecessary for low-precision training. The goal of this project is to evaluate such costs.
Project
- Investigation of the Sdotp unit and its fundamental blocks
- RTL modifications to the Sdotp unit. Support for special cases will be incrementally removed/modified, and its costs will be assessed.
Character
- 20% Literature / architecture review
- 40% RTL implementation
- 40% Evaluation
Prerequisites
- Strong interest in computer architecture
- Experience with digital design in SystemVerilog as taught in VLSI I
- Experience with ASIC implementation flow (synthesis) as taught in VLSI II
References
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03192 MiniFloat-NN and ExSdotp: An ISA Extension and a Modular Open Hardware Unit for Low-Precision Training on RISC-V cores
[2] https://github.com/openhwgroup/cvfpu/tree/feature/expanding_dotp