Publication

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a commonly used algorithm for training linear machine learning models. Based on vector algebra, it benefits from the inherent parallelism available in an FPGA. In this paper, we first present a single-precision floating-point SGD implementation on an FPGA that provides similar performance as a 10-core CPU. We then adapt the design to make it capable of processing low-precision data. The low-precision data is obtained from a novel compression scheme-called stochastic quantization, specifically designed for machine learning applications. We test both full-precision and low-precision designs on various regression and classification data sets. We achieve up to an order of magnitude training speedup when using low-precision data compared to a full-precision SGD on the same FPGA and a state-of-the-art multi-core solution, while maintaining the quality of training. We open source the designs presented in this paper.

@inproceedings{abc,
	abstract = {Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a commonly used algorithm for training linear machine learning models. Based on vector algebra, it benefits from the inherent parallelism available in an FPGA. In this paper, we first present a single-precision floating-point SGD implementation on an FPGA that provides similar performance as a 10-core CPU. We then adapt the design to make it capable of processing low-precision data. The low-precision data is obtained from a novel compression scheme-called stochastic quantization, specifically designed for machine learning applications. We test both full-precision and low-precision designs on various regression and classification data sets. We achieve up to an order of magnitude training speedup when using low-precision data compared to a full-precision SGD on the same FPGA and a state-of-the-art multi-core solution, while maintaining the quality of training. We open source the designs presented in this paper.},
	author = {Kaan Kara and Dan Alistarh and Gustavo Alonso and Onur Mutlu and Ce Zhang},
	booktitle = {25th IEEE Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines, FCCM 2017, Napa, CA, USA},
	title = {FPGA-Accelerated Dense Linear Machine Learning: A Precision-Convergence Trade-Off.},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/FCCM.2017.39},
	venue = {Napa, CA, USA},
	year = {2017}
}