MAERI 0.1

[Not yet ready!]

An end to end implementation of an ML CNN accelerator.

• Go from Tensorflow down to FPGA.
• You can stream in an image to be classified over ethernet to the FPGA as many times as you want without reconfiguring.
• 100% FOSS. Even the FPGA PNR and Synth tools (which were reverse engineered).
• RTL extensively formally verified.

Overview

Below is a high level overview of the hardware.

Dependencies

• yosys
• symbiyosys
• yices2

Yosys and yices2 can both be installed with homebrew (Mac) or linuxbrew

brew install bracketmaster/rtl/yosys
brew install SRI-CSL/sri-csl/yices2

Caveats

On MacOS BigSur, you might have install numpy manually:

brew install openblas
OPENBLAS="$(brew --prefix openblas)" pip3 install numpy

Installing

You should probably use a virtual environment. Change to wherever you install your virtual environments.

pip3 install virtualenv
mkdir -p ~/.virtualenvs
cd ~/.virtualenvs
python3 -m venv maeri
source ~/.virtualenvs/maeri_v6/bin/activate
git clone https://github.com/BracketMaster/maeri
cd maeri
pip3 install -e .

Getting Started

First connect the ULX3s to the host using the USB1 port on the ULX3s.

You can program the ULX3s with the accelerator by doing:

cd maeri/gateware/platform/ulx3s
python3 top.py
openFPGALoader -f -b ulx3s build/top.bit 

Now connect the ULX3s to the host using the USB2 port on the ULX3s.

You can test the driver from the ULX3s with:

cd test
PLATFORM=ulx3s python3 test_driver.py

You can test the assembler together with the accelerator with:

cd maeri/gateware/compute_unit
python3 test_top.py

You can test the compiler with:

cd maeri/compiler/tests
python3 test_compiler.py

Running Tests

To run all the unit tests in succession, do including formal tests:

python -m unittest discover -s test -v

Typically, the simulator state is preserved between unit tests to avoid having to setup and tear down the simulator between each unit test.

Running Formal Tests

To run a specific formal unit test(or really any unit test), do something to the effect of:

python3 test/gateware/test_adder_node.py

Status

Need to update this...

LOC Count

Keep forgetting how to do this.

find . -type f -name "*.py" | xargs wc -l

Optimizations

• faster configurations
  • I should be able to easily do this with mem-width of four and four config ports. I remove the extra top config port that is/was introduced? Was it actually introduced?