COIN: Communication-Aware In-Memory Acceleration for Graph Convolutional Networks
This addresses performance and energy efficiency issues for hardware acceleration in GCN applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing accelerators.
The paper tackles the high computation and irregular communication overheads in Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) by proposing COIN, a communication-aware in-memory computing architecture, which achieves up to 105x improvement in energy consumption compared to state-of-the-art GCN accelerators.
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have shown remarkable learning capabilities when processing graph-structured data found inherently in many application areas. GCNs distribute the outputs of neural networks embedded in each vertex over multiple iterations to take advantage of the relations captured by the underlying graphs. Consequently, they incur a significant amount of computation and irregular communication overheads, which call for GCN-specific hardware accelerators. To this end, this paper presents a communication-aware in-memory computing architecture (COIN) for GCN hardware acceleration. Besides accelerating the computation using custom compute elements (CE) and in-memory computing, COIN aims at minimizing the intra- and inter-CE communication in GCN operations to optimize the performance and energy efficiency. Experimental evaluations with widely used datasets show up to 105x improvement in energy consumption compared to state-of-the-art GCN accelerator.