DeepTools: Compiler and Execution Runtime Extensions for RaPiD AI Accelerator

The ubiquitous adoption of systems specialized for AI requires bridging two seemingly conflicting challenges—the need to deliver extreme processing efficiencies while employing familiar programming interfaces, making them compelling even for non-expert users. We take a significant first step towards this goal and present an end-to-end software stack for the RaPiD AI accelerator developed by IBM Research. We present a set of software extensions, called Deeptools, that leverage and work within popular deep learning frameworks. DeepTools requires no additional user input and enables aggressive, accelerator-specific performance optimization akin to a full, custom framework. DeepTools has two key components: 1) a compiler runtime called DeepRT, which automatically identifies how best to execute a given DNN graph on RaPiD and constructs the requisite program binaries; and 2) an execution runtime called RaPiDLib, which triggers and manages the execution of compute and data-transfer operations on RaPiD. We integrate DeepTools with TensorFlow and map popular DNNs (AlexNet, VGG, ResNet, LSTM) to RaPiD. We demonstrate substantial improvement in performance over hand-tuned mappings.