DSSA: Dual-Side Sparse Systolic Array Architecture for Accelerating Convolutional Neural Network Training
Zhengbo Chen, Qi Yu, Zheng Fang, Feng Guo, Zuoning Chen · 2022
Ever-growing CNN size incurs a significant amount of redundancy in model parameters, which in turn, puts considerable burden on hardware. Unstructured pruning is widely used to reduce model sparsity. While, the irregularity introduced by unstructured pruning makes it difficult to accelerate sparse CNNs on systolic array. To address this issue, a variety of accelerators have been proposed. SIGMA, the state-of-the-art sparse GEMM accelerator, achieves significant speedup over systolic array. However, SIGMA suffers from two disadvantages: 1) it only supports one-side sparsity, leaving potential for further performance gains; 2) SIGMA improves utilization of large-sized systolic arrays at the cost of extra overhead.