A Hybrid GPU-FPGA-based Computing Platform for Machine Learning

We present a hybrid GPU-FPGA based computing platform to tackle the high-density computing problem of machine learning. In our platform, the training part of a machine learning application is implemented on GPU and the inferencing part is implemented on FPGA. It should also include a model transplantation part which can transplant the model from the training part to the inferencing part. For evaluating this design methodology, we selected the LeNet-5 as our benchmark algorithm. During the training phase, GPU TitanXp’s speed was about 8.8x faster than CPU E-1620 and in the inferencing phase, FPGA Arria-10’s inferencing speed was fastest, 44.4x faster than CPU E-1620 and 6341x faster than GPU TitanXp. Moreover, by adopting our design methodology, we improved our LeNet-5 machine learning model’s accuracy from 99.05% to 99.13%, and successfully preserved the accuracy (99.13%) when transplanting the model from the GPU platform to the FPGA platform.