Satisfying the high computation demand of modern deep learning architectures is challenging for achieving low inference latency. The current approaches in decreasing latency only increase parallelism within a layer. This is because architectures typi
cally capture a single-chain dependency pattern that prevents efficient distribution with a higher concurrency (i.e., simultaneous execution of one inference among devices). Such single-chain dependencies are so widespread that even implicitly biases recent neural architecture search (NAS) studies. In this visionary paper, we draw attention to an entirely new space of NAS that relaxes the single-chain dependency to provide higher concurrency and distribution opportunities. To quantitatively compare these architectures, we propose a score that encapsulates crucial metrics such as communication, concurrency, and load balancing. Additionally, we propose a new generator and transformation block that consistently deliver superior architectures compared to current state-of-the-art methods. Finally, our preliminary results show that these new architectures reduce the inference latency and deserve more attention.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have inspired new studies in myriad edge applications with robots, autonomous agents, and Internet-of-things (IoT) devices. However, performing inference of DNNs in the edge is still a severe challenge, mainly because of t
he contradiction between the intensive resource requirements of DNNs and the tight resource availability in several edge domains. Further, as communication is costly, taking advantage of other available edge devices by using data- or model-parallelism methods is not an effective solution. To benefit from available compute resources with low communication overhead, we propose the first DNN parallelization method for reducing the communication overhead in a distributed system. We propose a low-communication parallelization (LCP) method in which models consist of several almost-independent and narrow branches. LCP offers close-to-minimum communication overhead with better distribution and parallelization opportunities while significantly reducing memory footprint and computation compared to data- and model-parallelism methods. We deploy LCP models on three distributed systems: AWS instances, Raspberry Pis, and PYNQ boards. We also evaluate the performance of LCP models on a customized hardware (tailored for low latency) implemented on a small edge FPGA and as a 16mW 0.107mm2 ASIC @7nm chip. LCP models achieve a maximum and average speedups of 56x and 7x, compared to the originals, which could be improved by up to an average speedup of 33x by incorporating common optimizations such as pruning and quantization.
