high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Breakthroughs from the field of deep learning are radically changing how sensor data are interpreted to extract the high-level information needed by mobile apps. It is critical that the gains in inference accuracy that deep models afford become embedded in future generations of mobile apps. In this work, we present the design and implementation of DeepX, a software accelerator for deep learning execution. DeepX significantly lowers the device resources (viz. memory, computation, energy) required by deep learning that currently act as a severe bottleneck to mobile adoption. The foundation of DeepX is a pair of resource control algorithms, designed for the inference stage of deep learning, that: (1) decompose monolithic deep model network architectures into unit-blocks of various types, that are then more efficiently executed by heterogeneous local device processors (e.g., GPUs, CPUs); and (2), perform principled resource scaling that adjusts the architecture of deep models to shape the overhead each unit-blocks introduces. Experiments show, DeepX can allow even large-scale deep learning models to execute efficiently on modern mobile processors and significantly outperform existing solutions, such as cloud-based offloading.