arXiv:2607.19431cs.ARcs.AI2026-07

提出BRIM加速器,解决双侧稀疏推理中的负载不均问题。

BRIM: Workload-Balanced Dual-Sided Bit-Serial Sparse Inference Accelerator

论文配图:BRIM: Workload-Balanced Dual-Sided Bit-Serial Sparse Inference Accelerator
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过循环均衡剪枝优化权重分布,提前平衡计算负载。
  • 实测核心利用率超90%,速度提升最高达2.37倍。
  • 适合追求高能效的深度神经网络推理部署场景。

比特串行加速器利用比特级稀疏性降低深度神经网络推理开销,但现有设计仅在单个操作数上利用稀疏性,限制了加速效果。同时在两个操作数上利用稀疏性可显著减少部分积数量,但引入了关键瓶颈:负载不均。由于每个并行处理的权值-激活对执行成本取决于两者非零比特数的乘积,导致需同步完成的任务完成时间差异巨大,使快速计算单元空闲。我们发现现有双侧设计中处理单元利用率仅为56%-64%。本文提出BRIM,一种软硬件协同设计的双侧比特串行稀疏推理加速器,直接针对此瓶颈。BRIM结合两项机制:1)循环均衡剪枝(CBP),一种训练后权重优化方法,基于激活统计特性重构权重表示,离线均衡并发对的预期工作量;2)成对槽位捐赠,一种轻量级硬件机制,以极小面积开销吸收运行时残余负载不均。在同面积约束下评估CNN、ViT和大语言模型,BRIM实现超过90%的处理单元利用率,相比先前双侧设计最高提速2.37倍,能效提升最高达1.63倍。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Bit-serial accelerators exploit bit-level sparsity to reduce DNN inference cost, but existing designs exploit sparsity on only one operand, bounding the speedup. Extending sparsity exploitation to both operands simultaneously yields compounding reductions in partial products but introduces a critical new bottleneck: workload imbalance. Because each concurrent weight - activation pair's execution cost depends on the product of two independently varying operand non-zero bit counts, pairs that must complete together finish at vastly different times, leaving faster computations idle. We show this limits PE utilization to 56 - 64% in existing dual-sided designs. We present BRIM, a hardware - software co-designed dual-sided bit-serial sparse accelerator that directly targets this bottleneck. BRIM combines two integrated mechanisms: 1) Cyclic-Balanced Pruning (CBP), a post-training weight optimization that reshapes weight representations based on profiled activation statistics to equalize expected workloads across concurrently processed pairs offline; and 2) Pairwise Slot Donation, a lightweight hardware mechanism that absorbs residual runtime imbalance with negligible area overhead. Evaluated across CNNs, ViTs, and LLMs under iso-area constraints, BRIM achieves over 90% PE utilization, up to 2.37x speedup, and up to 1.63x energy efficiency improvement over prior dual-sided designs.

稀疏推理加速器能效优化

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