Uniform memory multicore neural network accelerators (UNNAs) furnish huge computing power to emerging neural network applications. Meanwhile, with neural network architectures going deeper and wider, the limited memory capacity has become a constraint to deploy models on UNNA platforms. Therefore how to efficiently manage memory space and how to reduce workload footprints are urgently significant. In this paper, we propose Tetris: a heuristic static memory management framework for UNNA platforms. Tetris reconstructs execution flows and synchronization relationships among cores to analyze each tensor's liveness interval. Then the memory management problem is converted to a sequence permutation problem. Tetris uses a genetic algorithm to explore the permutation space to optimize the memory management strategy and reduce memory footprints. We evaluate several typical neural networks and the experimental results demonstrate that Tetris outperforms the state-of-the-art memory allocation methods, and achieves an average memory reduction ratio of 91.9% and 87.9% for a quad-core and a 16-core Cambricon-X platform, respectively.

The increasing attention on deep learning has tremendously spurred the design of intelligence processing hardware. The variety of emerging intelligence processors requires standard benchmarks for fair comparison and system optimization (in both software and hardware). However, existing benchmarks are unsuitable for benchmarking intelligence processors due to their non-diversity and nonrepresentativeness. Also, the lack of a standard benchmarking methodology further exacerbates this problem. In this paper, we propose BENCHIP, a benchmark suite and benchmarking methodology for intelligence processors. The benchmark suite in BENCHIP consists of two sets of benchmarks: microbenchmarks and macrobenchmarks. The microbenchmarks consist of single-layer networks. They are mainly designed for bottleneck analysis and system optimization. The macrobenchmarks contain state-of-the-art industrial networks, so as to offer a realistic comparison of different platforms. We also propose a standard benchmarking methodology built upon an industrial software stack and evaluation metrics that comprehensively reflect various characteristics of the evaluated intelligence processors. BENCHIP is utilized for evaluating various hardware platforms, including CPUs, GPUs, and accelerators. BENCHIP will be open-sourced soon.