EnergyNN: Energy Estimation for Neural Network Inference Tasks on DPU

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are increasingly becoming popular in embedded and energy limited mobile applications. Hardware designers have proposed various accelerators to speed up the execution of CNNs on embedded platforms. Deep Learning Processor Unit (DPU) is one such generic CNN accelerator for Xilinx platforms that can execute any CNN on one or more DPUs configured on an FPGA. In a period of rapid growth in CNN algorithms and the availability of multiple configurations of CNN accelerators (like DPU), the design space is expanding fast. These design points show significant trade-off in execution time, energy consumption and application performance measured in terms of accuracy. To be able to perform this trade-off, we propose a methodology for energy estimation of a CNN running on a DPU. We build an energy model using characteristics of few CNNs and use this model for energy prediction of other unseen CNNs. We evaluate our approach using 16 different standard and popular CNNs with an average prediction error of 9.9%. Energy estimation can be useful in various scheduling applications where one can choose from multiple CNNs based on its energy consumption. We demonstrate the utility of our approach in a drone that is deployed for detecting objects on the ground.