FlexPDA: A Flexible Programming Framework for Deep Learning Accelerators

There are a wide variety of intelligence accelerators with promising performance and energy efficiency, deployed in a broad range of applications such as computer vision and speech recognition. However, programming productivity hinders the deployment of deep learning accelerators. The low-level library invoked in the high-level deep learning framework which supports the end-to-end execution with a given model, is designed to reduce the programming burden on the intelligence accelerators. Unfortunately, it is inflexible for developers to build a network model for every deep learning application, which probably brings unnecessary repetitive implementation. In this paper, a flexible and efficient programming framework for deep learning accelerators, FlexPDA, is proposed, which provides more optimization opportunities than the low-level library and realizes quick transplantation of applications to intelligence accelerators for fast upgrades. We evaluate FlexPDA by using 10 representative operators selected from deep learning algorithms and an end-to-end network. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of FlexPDA, which achieves an end-to-end performance improvement of 1.620x over the low-level library.