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Do you even want to use floats when talking about FPGA NNs? You can talk directly about circuits on bitvectors, of which a subset looks like floats doing math,
by SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
Do you even want to use floats when talking about FPGA NNs?
You can talk directly about circuits on bitvectors, of which a subset looks like floats doing math, but your network might have a better encoding than that.
- banachtarski 9y agoYup exactly. There is some research on BNN (binary neural networks) but I was curious how this paper approached it (not really anything of substance here)
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoTangent, but I suspect you've researched this topic more than I have -- do you know of any good source on the subject of FPGA NNs? It dawns on me that FPGAs might actually be better than GPUs for a project I've been thinking about, but I know relatively little about state-of-the-art design/synthesis techniques.
- banachtarski 9y agoI've searched high and low and there isn't much, partially because the barrier to entry to both is really high. I've been experimenting a fair bit and might start blogging about both failed and successful experiments I've run on a Cyclone V FGPA but I'm not convinced there'd be a ton of interest. That said, I do not work at a company that uses FPGAs or proprietary hardware and I believe part of the reason the field is dark is because that's just how hardware development shops have operated.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoYour experience of it being hard to even get started because of the insular hardware community mirrors mine. (Well, I guess my employer does use FPGAs somewhere, but in a department far from me.) Are you just using a Cyclone V demo board? To be honest, it's actually a little hard to even find FPGA accelerators that aren't bespoke.