FPL19 Split Networks on FPGA

Implementation of a split, distributed CNN (ResNet V1 18), deployed to 2 PYNQ FPGA boards using TVM/VTA.

Github repo is available here.

Motivation

Implementation of deep neural networks (DNNs) are hard to achieve on edge devices because DNNs often require more resources than those provided by individual edge devices.

The idea of this project is to create an edge-tailored model by splitting a DNN into independent narrow DNNs to run separately on multiple edge devices in parallel.

The outputs from the split networks are then concatenated and fed through the fully connected layers to perform inference.

Code Description

• splitnet.py contains split models built with MxNet Gluon. Only resnet18_v1_split is implemented so far.
• resnet18_v1_split returns a split version of mxnet.gluon.model_zoo.vision.resnet18_v1; initialized with random weights.
• demo.py demonstrates how to deploy split networks to 2 PYNQ FPGA boards with TVM/VTA and how to concatenate the results.
• autotune.py uses TVM's autotuning tool to achieve fast performance when running resnet18_v1_split on PYNQ FPGA. Currently broken.

Setup

PYNQ Boards

To deploy the split networks, first acquire 2 PYNQ boards and set them up following instructions here.

After PYNQ boards are set up, follow instructions here to launch TVM-based RPC servers on both boards. You should see the following output when starting the RPC server:

INFO:root:RPCServer: bind to 0.0.0.0:9091

The RPC server should be listening on port 9091.

Local

The following instructions apply to your local machine. CNN models are developed, compiled & uploaded to PYNQ boards from your local machine via RPC.

First, install TVM with LLVM enabled. Follow the instructions here.

Install the necessary python dependencies:

pip3 install --user numpy decorator attrs

Next, you need to add a configuration file for VTA:

cd <tvm root>
cp vta/config/pynq_sample.json vta/config/vta_config.json

When the TVM compiler compiles the convolutional operators in a neural network, it queries a log file to get the best knob parameters to achieve fast performance. Normally, for a particular network, this log file is generated using TVM's autotuning tool (autotune.py).

However, since this tool seems to be broken, log file for resnet18_v1_split was manually created.

Move this log file to where the compiler can find it:

cd <project root>
cp vta_v0.05.log ~/.tvm/tophub/vta_v0.05.log

Usage

After setup has been complete on both the PYNQ and host end, you are now ready to deploy the split networks. demo.py is a minimal example that shows you how to do this.

First, install additional Python dependencies:

pip3 install --user mxnet pillow

Then run the demo:

python3 demo.py [--cpu] [--nonsplit] [--i]

Options:

• --cpu Run model on local machine instead of PYNQ boards.

• --nonsplit Run the non-split version of the model.

• --i Run the interactive version of the demo. This allows you to enter paths to image files to feed to model.

By default, the demo downloads 50 images of animals from Google Images, feeds them to the model, and reports the mean and standard deviation (in sec) of the inference delays.