cuSCNN : an Efficient CUDA Implementation of Sparse CNNs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Deep Neural Network models are becoming much larger which greatly increases their computation and memory requirements. Sparsity offers great opportunities to reduce unnecessary data transfers and computations. However, exploiting sparsity in CNN inference presents challenges such as irregularities in memory access patterns. To overcome this challenge, we propose cuSCNN, an efficient sparse CNN inference engine that leverages the sparsity of both models and activations using optimized sparse-sparse matrix convolution kernels with compressed operands. cuSCNN is motivated by the concepts introduced by the SCNN hardware accelerator[21] but modified appropriately to achieve an efficient software implementation for GPUs. We develop GPU optimizations that boost execution performance and reduce the required memory size and bandwidth. cuSCNN achieves a speedup of up to 171 × compared to an efficient CPU implementation and 30 × speedup compared to a multi-threaded CPU implementation without batching, enabling the use of inexpensive low-end memory-constrained GPUs to implement large networks with near real-time latency. Although GPU throughput can benefit from larger batch sizes, batch size 1 achieves the lowest latency and hence we focus on it.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".