Next week, the IEEE International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology (FPT) will take place in Tianjin in China. I’m proud that my former PhD student Qiang Liu will be General Chair of the conference.
I am a coauthor of two papers to be presented at FPT, one led by my former BEng student Aaron Zhao, now a PhD student at Cambridge supervised by my colleague Rob Mullins, and one led by my former postdoc, Ameer Abdelhadi, now with COHESA / UofT. The paper by Aaron is also in collaboration with two of my former PhD students, Xitong Gao, now with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Junyi Liu, now with Microsoft Research.
The first paper, led by Aaron, is entitled ‘Automatic Generation of Multi-precision Multi-arithmetic CNN Accelerators for FPGAs’, and can be found on arXiv here. This paper is a serious look at getting an automated CNN flow for FPGAs that makes good use of some of the arithmetic flexibility available on these devices. Powers-of-two (“free” multiplication) and fixed-point (“cheap” multiplication) are both leveraged.
The second paper, led by Ameer, looks at the computation of a set of approximate nearest neighbours. This is useful in a number of machine learning settings, both directly as a non-neural deep learning inference algorithm and indirectly within sophisticated deep learning algorithms like Neural Turing Machines. Ameer has shown that this task can be successfully accelerated in an FPGA design, and explores some interesting ways to parameterise the algorithm to make the most of the hardware, leading to tradeoffs between algorithm accuracy and performance.
If you’re at FPT this year, please go and say hello to Aaron, Ameer and Qiang.
Thinking 