Customizable FPGA-based Accelerator for Binarized Graph Neural Networks
Ziwei Wang, Zhiqiang Que, Wayne W. Luk, Hongxiang Fan · 2022
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have demon-strated their excellent algorithmic performance in various graph-based learning applications. Nevertheless, the massive amount of computation required by analyzing graph data structures puts a heavy burden on the hardware performance, limiting their deployment in real-life scienarios. To address this issue, we propose a customizable FPGA-based design to accelerate binarized GCNs (BiGCNs). The proposed accelerator is parameterized by different loop unrolling and memory partition factors, which can be reconfigured to fulfill different user needs. To ease the bandwidth requirement of BiGCNs, our design overlaps the data transfer with computation. We also adopt COO (Coordinate) format storage for the adjacency matrix to skip the redundant computation to improve hardware performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed FPGA-based BiGCN design achieves 202× and 10.6× speedup than CPU and GPU implementations on the Flickr dataset.