Krste Asanovic

Hasan Genc, Seah Kim, Alon Amid et al.

DNN accelerators are often developed and evaluated in isolation without considering the cross-stack, system-level effects in real-world environments. This makes it difficult to appreciate the impact of System-on-Chip (SoC) resource contention, OS overheads, and programming-stack inefficiencies on overall performance/energy-efficiency. To address this challenge, we present Gemmini, an open-source*, full-stack DNN accelerator generator. Gemmini generates a wide design-space of efficient ASIC accelerators from a flexible architectural template, together with flexible programming stacks and full SoCs with shared resources that capture system-level effects. Gemmini-generated accelerators have also been fabricated, delivering up to three orders-of-magnitude speedups over high-performance CPUs on various DNN benchmarks. * https://github.com/ucb-bar/gemmini

Qijing Huang, Ameer Haj-Ali, William Moses et al.

The performance of the code a compiler generates depends on the order in which it applies the optimization passes. Choosing a good order--often referred to as the phase-ordering problem, is an NP-hard problem. As a result, existing solutions rely on a variety of heuristics. In this paper, we evaluate a new technique to address the phase-ordering problem: deep reinforcement learning. To this end, we implement AutoPhase: a framework that takes a program and uses deep reinforcement learning to find a sequence of compilation passes that minimizes its execution time. Without loss of generality, we construct this framework in the context of the LLVM compiler toolchain and target high-level synthesis programs. We use random forests to quantify the correlation between the effectiveness of a given pass and the program's features. This helps us reduce the search space by avoiding phase orderings that are unlikely to improve the performance of a given program. We compare the performance of AutoPhase to state-of-the-art algorithms that address the phase-ordering problem. In our evaluation, we show that AutoPhase improves circuit performance by 28% when compared to using the -O3 compiler flag, and achieves competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art solutions, while requiring fewer samples. Furthermore, unlike existing state-of-the-art solutions, our deep reinforcement learning solution shows promising result in generalizing to real benchmarks and 12,874 different randomly generated programs, after training on a hundred randomly generated programs.

Ameer Haj-Ali, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Ted Willke et al.

Many real-world systems problems require reasoning about the long term consequences of actions taken to configure and manage the system. These problems with delayed and often sequentially aggregated reward, are often inherently reinforcement learning problems and present the opportunity to leverage the recent substantial advances in deep reinforcement learning. However, in some cases, it is not clear why deep reinforcement learning is a good fit for the problem. Sometimes, it does not perform better than the state-of-the-art solutions. And in other cases, random search or greedy algorithms could outperform deep reinforcement learning. In this paper, we review, discuss, and evaluate the recent trends of using deep reinforcement learning in system optimization. We propose a set of essential metrics to guide future works in evaluating the efficacy of using deep reinforcement learning in system optimization. Our evaluation includes challenges, the types of problems, their formulation in the deep reinforcement learning setting, embedding, the model used, efficiency, and robustness. We conclude with a discussion on open challenges and potential directions for pushing further the integration of reinforcement learning in system optimization.

Ameer Haj-Ali, Qijing Huang, William Moses et al.

The performance of the code generated by a compiler depends on the order in which the optimization passes are applied. In high-level synthesis, the quality of the generated circuit relates directly to the code generated by the front-end compiler. Choosing a good order--often referred to as the phase-ordering problem--is an NP-hard problem. In this paper, we evaluate a new technique to address the phase-ordering problem: deep reinforcement learning. We implement a framework in the context of the LLVM compiler to optimize the ordering for HLS programs and compare the performance of deep reinforcement learning to state-of-the-art algorithms that address the phase-ordering problem. Overall, our framework runs one to two orders of magnitude faster than these algorithms, and achieves a 16% improvement in circuit performance over the -O3 compiler flag.