Towards efficient deep neural network training by FPGAbased batchlevel parallelism Training deep neural networks (DNNs) requires a significant amount of time and resources to obtain acceptable results, which severely limits its deployment in resourcelimited platforms. This paper proposes DarkFPGA, a novel customizable framework to efficiently accelerate the entire DNN training on a single FPGA platform. First, we explore batchlevel parallelism to enable efficient FPGAbased DNN training. Second, we devise a novel hardware architecture optimised by a batchoriented data pattern and tiling techniques to effectively exploit parallelism. Moreover, an analytical model is developed to determine the optimal design parameters for the DarkFPGA accelerator with respect to a specific network specification and FPGA resource constraints. Our results show that the accelerator is able to perform about 10 times faster than CPU training and about a third of the energy consumption than GPU training using 8bit integers for training VGGlike networks on the CIFAR dataset for the Maxeler MAX5 platform.

Memory and Interconnect Optimizations for PetaScale Deep Learning Systems Hardware accelerators are a promising solution to the stringent computational requirements of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Ranging from lowpower IP cores to server class systems, various accelerator architectures with high TOPSW peak processing efficiencies and flexibility to execute different DNN topologies have been proposed. Prior efforts improve core utilization through better dataflows and computation sequencing, but little effort has thus far been devoted to systematically programming DNN accelerators to extract best possible system utilization, particularly for DNN training, which can be parallelized across petascale systems. In this work, we address the hitherto open challenge of systematically mapping computations onto Petascale accelerator systems, comprising many (thousands of) processing cores spanning many chips, while maximizing overall system performance. We achieve this by characterizing the design space of possible mapping configurations, building a detailed performance model that incorporates every computation and datatransfer involved in DNN training, and using a design space exploration tool called DEEPSPATIALMATRIX to identify the performance optimal configuration. We highlight 4 key optimizations built within DEEPSPATIALMATRIX  hybrid datamodel parallelism, interlayer memory reuse, timestep pipelining, and dynamic spatial minibatching  each of which improve system utilization by carefully managing the available memory capacity and interconnect bandwidth to balance the compute vs. communication costs. On a 8petaFLOP accelerator system, we demonstrate 1.36xc3x9732xc3x97 improvement in training performance through our design space exploration and optimizations across image recognition (VGG16, ResNet50) and machine translation (GNMT) DNN models.