Hardware acceleration of complex machine learning models through modern high-level synthesis

Machine learning (ML) and deep learning algorithms are well suited to process and analyze large amounts of data, as it has been repeatedly proven in applications such as image classification, natural language processing, or recommendation systems. Both ML training and inference are compute- and memory-intensive, leading to widespread adoption of heterogeneous systems containing specialized accelerators. While graphic processing units (GPUs) are the established platform of choice to accelerate training, they are often too power-hungry to run inference tasks, or cannot meet the strict latency requirements of scientific experiments. A variety of custom solutions implemented as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) or application-specific circuit (ASICs) have been proposed in their place, ranging from generic "neural processors" to accelerators that focus on a narrow set of models with great efficiency.