Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2411.16152

Optimizing Winograd Convolution on ARMv8 processors

Abstract

As Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) gain prominence in deep learning, algorithms like Winograd Convolution have been introduced to enhance computational efficiency. However, existing implementations often face challenges such as high transformation overhead, suboptimal computation efficiency, and reduced parallel performance in some layers. We propose a fused Winograd Convolution algorithm optimized for ARMv8 CPUs, integrating input transformation, filter transformation, computation, and output transformation into a single pipeline. By maintaining consecutive memory access and using a custom z-shaped data layout, our approach fully utilizes an optimized GEMM micro-kernel with a ping-pong technique. Additionally, we introduce a multi-dimensional parallel strategy that adapts to convolutional layer scales. To maximize performance, we manually optimize each kernel in AArch64 assembly and carefully tune blocking parameters. Experimental results show speedups of up to 4.74x, 4.10x, 4.72x, and 10.57x over NCNN, NNPACK, FastConv, and ACL on the Kunpeng 920 platform using multiple threads, with respective gains of 3.85x, 2.81x, 4.20x, and 7.80x on the AWS Graviton2, and 3.32x, 3.68x, 8.00x, and 9.28x on the Phytium 2000+.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Haoyuan Gui, Xiaoyu Zhang, Chong Zhang, Zitong Su, Huiyuan Li. 2024-12-25. Optimizing Winograd Convolution on ARMv8 processors. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.16152

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Performance Analysis of Low-Order, GPU-accelerated Finite Element Kernels using Kokkos

We study performance portability for low-order, matrix-free finite element kernels, using the example of a vectorial, variable-coefficient PDE operator originating in geophysical models. Written in Kokkos, the kernel is compared on NVIDIA H100, AMD MI250X, AMD MI300A and Intel PVC Max 1550 GPUs. Owing to its low order and to optimizations that reduce the arithmetic, the kernel has a low arithmetic intensity, so that its performance is determined by how the finite element assembly is mapped onto the memory hierarchy. This is a dimension in which the architectures differ even within one vendor family, causing different performance characteristics. We examine how Kokkos' hierarchical parallelism and shared scratch memory, which are used for the shared degrees of freedom of the conforming discretization, behave on each device. Finally, we show how portability gaps can be narrowed with tuning levers such as the size of the thread groups, the balance between occupancy and register use, and the atomic accumulation strategy at the end of the kernel.

cs.PF

Measured Joules, Learned Routes: Learning to Route for Energy-Efficient LLM Serving

Large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI systems are creating rapidly growing inference energy demands as model sizes grow and reasoning trajectories extend. While in practice, many queries do not require the capabilities of the largest available model, and routinely directing such queries to a high-capability model can introduce unnecessary, considerable computation and energy consumption. In this paper, we investigate whether adaptive routing across a heterogeneous pool of LLMs can reduce this energy burden without substantially compromising task performance. We design a language-model-based router that reads in each query and selects an answer model from a fixed candidate pool. The candidate models are first profiled through an offline tournament that records their correctness, latency, power, and GPU energy for each query. Using these measurements, the router is trained through supervised fine-tuning followed by group relative policy optimization (GRPO) with the tailored paradigms. Results demonstrate that learned routing can selectively allocate expensive model capacity based on query context and improve the accuracy-energy tradeoff in multi-LLM serving. Across seven benchmark tasks, we also observe a sharp accuracy-energy phase transition among routers, providing practical insights into improving energy efficiency while maintaining LLM performance.

cs.PF

PrefixBench-H100: Characterizing Prefix Reuse and Time-to-First-Token in H100 LLM Serving

Repeated prompt prefixes are increasingly common in LLM serving workloads, appearing in system prompts, templated retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, agent frameworks, and multi-turn conversations. Modern inference runtimes such as vLLM and TensorRT-LLM provide mechanisms for reusing previously computed KV-cache state across requests, yet it remains unclear when prefix reuse materially improves serving performance on contemporary accelerators and when its benefits are limited by scheduling, cache granularity, concurrency, or memory pressure. This paper presents PrefixBench-H100, a reproducible benchmark and measurement framework for characterizing prefix reuse on a single NVIDIA H100. PrefixBench-H100 combines controlled synthetic traces with chat-style and retrieval-style workloads, and evaluates two widely used LLM serving runtimes under matched workload conditions. The benchmark varies shared-prefix length, suffix diversity, request arrival pattern, concurrency, output length, and cache configuration, while collecting time-to-first-token, inter-token latency, end-to-end latency, throughput, cache-hit statistics, GPU memory usage, and selected profiling traces. The goal of PrefixBench-H100 is not to introduce a new caching algorithm, but to expose the practical operating envelope of prefix reuse for H100-class LLM serving. The study identifies the regime where prefix reuse provides substantial first-token latency reductions and the regime where cache pressure erodes them, while showing that cache effectiveness itself is largely insensitive to concurrency and output length; the cross-runtime differences that remain arise above the cache, in the scheduling layer.

cs.PF