Fast Yet Accurate Timing and Power Prediction of Artificial Neural Networks Deployed on Clock-Gated Multi-Core Platforms

When deploying Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) onto multicore embedded platforms, an intensive evaluation flow is necessary to find implementations that optimize resource usage, timing and power. ANNs require indeed significant amounts of computational and memory resources to execute, while embedded execution platforms offer limited resources with strict power budget. Concurrent accesses from processors to shared resources on multi-core platforms can lead to bottlenecks with impact on performance and power. Existing approaches show limitations to deliver fast yet accurate evaluation ahead of ANN deployment on the targeted hardware. In this paper, we present a modeling flow for timing and power prediction in early design stage of fully-connected ANNs on multi-core platforms. Our flow offers fast yet accurate predictions with consideration of shared communication resources and scalability in regards of the number of cores used. The flow is evaluated on real measurements for 42 mappings of 3 fully-connected ANNs executed on a clock-gated multi-core platform featuring two different communication modes: polling or interrupt-based. Our modeling flow predicts timing with 97 % accuracy and power with 96 % accuracy on the tested mappings for an average simulation time of 0.23 s for 100 iterations. We then illustrate the application of our approach for efficient design space exploration of ANN implementations.