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Enabling Resource-Aware Mapping of Spiking Neural Networks via Spatial Decomposition
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Enabling Resource-Aware Mapping of Spiking Neural Networks via Spatial Decomposition

Adarsha Balaji, Shihao Song, Anup Das, Jeffrey Krichmar, Nikil Dutt, James Shackleford, Nagarajan Kandasamy and Francky Catthoor
IEEE embedded systems letters, v 13(3), pp 142-145
Sep 2021
url
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/handle/123456789/682266View
Accepted (AM)Open Access (License Unspecified) Open

Abstract

Computation graph Computational modeling Hardware Machine learning neuromorphic computing Neuromorphics Neurons Nonvolatile memory spiking neural networks (SNNs) Synapses
With growing model complexity, mapping spiking neural network (SNN)-based applications to tile-based neuromorphic hardware is becoming increasingly challenging. This is because the synaptic storage resources on a tile, viz. , a crossbar, can accommodate only a fixed number of presynaptic connections per postsynaptic neuron. For complex SNN models that have many presynaptic connections per neuron, some connections may need to be pruned after training to fit onto the tile resources, leading to a loss in the model quality, e.g., accuracy. In this letter, we propose a novel unrolling technique that decomposes a neuron function with many presynaptic connections into a sequence of homogeneous neural units, where each neural unit is a function computation node, with two presynaptic connections. This spatial decomposition technique significantly improves crossbar utilization and retains all presynaptic connections, resulting in no loss of the model quality derived from connection pruning. We integrate the proposed technique within an existing SNN mapping framework and evaluate it using machine learning applications on the DYNAP-SE state-of-the-art neuromorphic hardware. Our results demonstrate an average 60% lower crossbar requirement, 9\times higher synapse utilization, 62% lower wasted energy on the hardware, and between 0.8% and 4.6% increase in the model quality.

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Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture
Computer Science, Software Engineering
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
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