Title: Hardware-Aware Machine Learning: Modeling and Optimization,
Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in Deep Learning (DL) applications have made DL models a
key component in almost every modern computing system. The increased popularity
of DL applications deployed on a wide-spectrum of platforms have resulted in a
plethora of design challenges related to the constraints introduced by the
hardware itself. What is the latency or energy cost for an inference made by a
Deep Neural Network (DNN)? Is it possible to predict this latency or energy
consumption before a model is trained? If yes, how can machine learners take
advantage of these models to design the hardware-optimal DNN for deployment?
From lengthening battery life of mobile devices to reducing the runtime
requirements of DL models executing in the cloud, the answers to these
questions have drawn significant attention.
One cannot optimize what isn't properly modeled. Therefore, it is important
to understand the hardware efficiency of DL models during serving for making an
inference, before even training the model. This key observation has motivated
the use of predictive models to capture the hardware performance or energy
efficiency of DL applications. Furthermore, DL practitioners are challenged
with the task of designing the DNN model, i.e., of tuning the hyper-parameters
of the DNN architecture, while optimizing for both accuracy of the DL model and
its hardware efficiency. Therefore, state-of-the-art methodologies have
proposed hardware-aware hyper-parameter optimization techniques. In this paper,
we provide a comprehensive assessment of state-of-the-art work and selected
results on the hardware-aware modeling and optimization for DL applications. We
also highlight several open questions that are poised to give rise to novel
hardware-aware designs in the next few years, as DL applications continue to
significantly impact associated hardware systems and platforms.