Learned Cost Model for Placement on Reconfigurable Dataflow Hardware

Guha, Etash, Jiang, Tianxiao, Deng, Andrew, Zhang, Jian, Annamalai, Muthu

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

Mapping a dataflow - graph of an ML model onto a reconfigurable system is difficult, as different mappings have different throughputs and consume resource constraints differently. To solve this, a model to evaluate the throughput of mappings is necessary as measuring throughput completely is expensive. Many use a hand - designed analytical model, relying on proxy features or intuition, introducing error. We provide a Learned Approach that predicts throughput 31% - 52% more accurately over a variety of graphs. In addition, our approach shows no accuracy degradation after removing performance annotations. We show that using this approach results in 5.6% faster compiled graphs.