A Comparative Analysis of Microrings Based Incoherent Photonic GEMM Accelerators
This work addresses performance bottlenecks in photonic computing hardware for AI applications, representing an incremental improvement in accelerator design.
The paper tackles the problem of optimizing microring resonator-based photonic accelerators for matrix multiplications in deep neural networks by analyzing different orders of signal manipulations, finding that the SMWA organization achieves up to 5.2× better area-energy efficiency compared to other configurations.
Several microring resonator (MRR) based analog photonic architectures have been proposed to accelerate general matrix-matrix multiplications (GEMMs) in deep neural networks with exceptional throughput and energy efficiency. To implement GEMM functions, these MRR-based architectures, in general, manipulate optical signals in five different ways: (i) Splitting (copying) of multiple optical signals to achieve a certain fan-out, (ii) Aggregation (multiplexing) of multiple optical signals to achieve a certain fan-in, (iii) Modulation of optical signals to imprint input values onto analog signal amplitude, (iv) Weighting of modulated optical signals to achieve analog input-weight multiplication, (v) Summation of optical signals. The MRR-based GEMM accelerators undertake the first four ways of signal manipulation in an arbitrary order ignoring the possible impact of the order of these manipulations on their performance. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of accelerator organizations with three different orders of these manipulations: (1) Modulation-Aggregation-Splitting-Weighting (MASW), (2) Aggregation-Splitting-Modulation-Weighting (ASMW), and (3) Splitting-Modulation-Weighting-Aggregation (SMWA). We show that these organizations affect the crosstalk noise and optical signal losses in different magnitudes, which renders these organizations with different levels of processing parallelism at the circuit level, and different magnitudes of throughput and energy-area efficiency at the system level. Our evaluation results for four CNN models show that SMWA organization achieves up to 4.4$\times$, 5$\times$, and 5.2$\times$ better throughput, energy efficiency, and area-energy efficiency, respectively, compared to ASMW and MASW organizations on average.