المفاهيم الأساسية
MICSim is an open-source, modular simulator that enables early-stage evaluation of software performance and hardware overhead for mixed-signal compute-in-memory (CIM) accelerators targeting both CNNs and Transformers.
الملخص
The paper introduces MICSim, an open-source, pre-circuit simulator designed for early-stage evaluation of chip-level software performance and hardware overhead of mixed-signal compute-in-memory (CIM) accelerators. MICSim features a modular design, allowing easy multi-level co-design and design space exploration.
Key highlights:
MICSim supports both CNNs and Transformers by unifying the construction models through modular calculations, enabling users to easily integrate CIM operations into various neural networks.
MICSim decouples the modeling of algorithms (quantization), architecture (digit mapping), circuit (ADC), and device (precision, on/off ratio) to provide a highly configurable simulation framework.
MICSim introduces an "average mode" to achieve a 9x-32x speedup over the trace-based mode in NeuroSim, the state-of-the-art CIM simulator, by leveraging data statistics instead of full traces.
MICSim demonstrates the benefits of its modular approach through a design space exploration for a CNN inference accelerator, exploring the cross-layer optimization of algorithms, architectures, circuits, and devices.
MICSim is used to evaluate a CIM-based accelerator for the BERT Transformer model, showcasing its capability in simulating Transformer-based models.
الإحصائيات
"MICSim can achieve a 9× ∼32× speedup of NeuroSim through a statistic-based average mode proposed by this work."
"MICSim has a minimal impact on throughput compared to the trace mode, with less than 10% differences in energy efficiency."
اقتباسات
"MICSim natively supports evaluating accelerators' software and hardware performance for CNNs and Transformers in Python, leveraging the popular PyTorch and HuggingFace Transformers frameworks."
"This modular approach also allows MICSim to be effectively extended to accommodate new designs."