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Technical University of Munich
Technical University of Munich

Seminar on Development and Integration of Hardware Accelerators (IN2107)

Dirk Stober and Xiaorang Guo

Dates:

Kick-off Meeting mid October
Kick-off meeting:

t.b.d
Regular meetings t.b.d
Presentations: t.b.d
ECTS: 5
Language: English
Type: Seminar, 2SWS
Registration:

Matching System
Questions:  Contact dirk.stober(at)tum.de
Requirements: 

Good unterstanding of Computer Architecture and Digital Design required!

 

This course is part of the BB-KI (Brandenburg / Bayern Aktion für KI-Hardware) chips project, aimed at offering practical courses in the area of dedicated AI Hardware.

Topics

The goal of the seminar is to explore approaches in integrating and developing new domain specific architectures and accelerators, as well as studying existing accelerators. Possible topics might include but are not limited to:

Hardware Development:
  • Open Source HLS (e.g. PandA-Bambu, XLS) and FPGA toolchain (Yosys, etc.)
  • Domain-specific languages: Sycl, OpenACC, HPX, DaCe, ...
  • More Abstract Hardware Description Languages and Frameworks (CHISEL, FIRRTL, Magma and more) 
  • Machine Learning on FPGAs (hls4ml, FINN, ...)
HW/SW Interface and Integration:
  • Hardware & Software Co-Design (Development, Debugging and Simulation)
  • ASIC accelerators: Bus Interfaces and Programming Languages (TPU, NVDLA, Cerebras,...)
  • Memory Hierachy on Heterogeneous platforms: Shared Memory, Caches, Scratchpads, Coherence and Virtual Memory Support
  • Integration of FPGAs into Cloud Environment
Novel AI accelerators/architectures
  • Vision Transformer (ViT) Accelerator (Supervisor: Xiaorang Guo) (paper)
  • Graph convolutional neural networks (Supervisor: Xiaorang Guo) (paper)
  • AI for Quantum Application: Efficient ML architecture for qubit readout (Supervisor: Xiaorang Guo) (paper)
  • Processing In Memory: Microarchitecture, Workloads, Synchronization and Software Interface (Samsung Function-In-Memory, Academic Approaches) (paper)
  • ASIC accelerators for ML: Microarchitecture (TPU, Cerebas, Eyeriss,...)
  • Course Grained Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRA): Application Cases, Architectures, Programming Models

 

Your own topic in the area?

 

Organization

Kick off Meeting:

  • Presentation of topics and course details
  • probably 15.10 at 14:00
  • One mandatory meeting with supervisor until December

Presentation & Draft (December):

  • ~15 min presentation + Questions in December 
  • Hand-In draft of your report 

Report:

  • Literary survey or small implementation
  • Concepts and Trade-offs
  • If applicable experience from implementation
  • Reviewed by other student
  • Deadline: End of semester

Final Video Presentation

  • Short 5 min pre-recorded Summary of your work/presentation in video form to be presented to other students.

Grading:

The work will be performed on an individual basis and the final grade will be based on the sum of the three grades (Presentation in December, Report and Video), with all three tasks being mandatory to pass.

Prerequisites

  • Interest in Computer Architecture and/or low level programming
  • Ability to work independently
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