Accelerating Diffusion Models for Generative AI Applications with Silicon Photonics
This work provides a more energy-efficient and faster hardware solution for running diffusion models, which is significant for researchers and practitioners in generative AI.
This paper addresses the high inference energy of diffusion models by presenting a novel silicon photonics-based accelerator. Experimental evaluations show that this accelerator achieves at least 3x better energy efficiency and 5.5x throughput improvement compared to existing state-of-the-art diffusion model accelerators.
Diffusion models have revolutionized generative AI, with their inherent capacity to generate highly realistic state-of-the-art synthetic data. However, these models employ an iterative denoising process over computationally intensive layers such as UNets and attention mechanisms. This results in high inference energy on conventional electronic platforms, and thus, there is an emerging need to accelerate these models in a sustainable manner. To address this challenge, we present a novel silicon photonics-based accelerator for diffusion models. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our photonic accelerator achieves at least 3x better energy efficiency and 5.5x throughput improvement compared to state-of-the-art diffusion model accelerators.