Lightning Talk: Software Development for ML and RISC-V Vector Acceler... Lee Moore & Simon Davidmann

Lightning Talk: Software Development for ML and RISC-V Vector Accelerators - Lee Moore & Simon Davidmann, Imperas Software The RISC-V Vector Extensions offer developers a wide range of options and configurations to provide hardware acceleration for the key algorithms for compute intensive applications such as Machine Learning. In addition, the RISC-V ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) supports custom instructions and heterogeneous multicore arrays that can scale to address the most demanding requirements. This talk will highlight the eSol project that successfully mixed an Arm Corex-A57 and 16 RISC V cores to accelerate the ALEXNET image recognition deep neural network as a custom hardware accelerator. Using standard training datasets, the workload requirements across the processor array was established for the key metrics for performance and optimization. Further software development helped to fine tune the application and provide test cases that can be used throughout the hardware design and verification p