Latte: a language, compiler, and runtime for elegant and efficient deep neural networks

Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have undergone a surge in popularity with consistent advances in the state of the art for tasks including image recognition, natural language processing, and speech recognition. The computationally expensive nature of these networks has led to the proliferation of implementations that sacrifice abstraction for high performance. In this paper, we present Latte, a domain-specific language for DNNs that provides a natural abstraction for specifying new layers without sacrificing performance. Users of Latte express DNNs as ensembles of neurons with connections between them. The Latte compiler synthesizes a program based on the user specification, applies a suite of domain-specific and general optimizations, and emits efficient machine code for heterogeneous architectures. Latte also includes a communication runtime for distributed memory data-parallelism. Using networks described using Latte, we demonstrate 3-6x speedup over Caffe (C++/MKL) on the three state-of-the-art ImageNet models executing on an Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3 x86 CPU.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jun 02, 2016
Source ID
10.1145/2980983.2908105

Entities

People

  • Armando Fox
  • Chick Markley
  • Ehsan Totoni
  • Hai Liu
  • Leonard Truong
  • Rajkishore Barik
  • Tatiana Shpeisman

Organizations

  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • Intel Corporation
  • University of California, Berkeley

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Materials Science and Engineering.
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks