Acceleration Of Scientific Deep Learning Models On Heterogeneous Computing Platform With Intel (R) Fpgas

AI and deep learning are experiencing explosive growth in almost every domain involving analysis of big data. Deep learning using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has shown great promise for such scientific data analysis applications. However, traditional CPU-based sequential computing can no longer meet the requirements of mission-critical applications, which are compute-intensive and require low latency and high throughput. Heterogeneous computing (HGC), with CPUs integrated with accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs, offers unique capabilities to accelerate DNNs. Collaborating researchers at SHREC1 at the University of Florida, NERSC2 at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, CERN Openlab, Dell EMC, and Intel are studying the application of heterogeneous computing (HGC) to scientific problems using DNN models. This paper focuses on the use of FPGAs to accelerate the inferencing stage of the HGC workflow. We present case studies and results in inferencing state-of-the-art DNN models for scientific data analysis, using Intel distribution of OpenVINO, running on an Intel Programmable Acceleration Card (PAC) equipped with an Arria 10 GX FPGA. Using the Intel Deep Learning Acceleration (DLA) development suite to optimize existing FPGA primitives and develop new ones, we were able accelerate the scientific DNN models under study with a speedup from 3x to 6x for a single Arria 10 FPGA against a single core (single thread) of a server-class Skylake CPU.