OpenPOWER Summit Europe 2019

NVDLA is a deep learning accelerator with both hardware and software available in open source community. IBM announced open hardware strategy recently, which focuses on building open ecosystem of OpenCAPI based heterogeneous computing system. To align with this open strategy, we proposed the solution to connect NVDLA with OpenCAPI so that the AI inference acceleration becomes possible with all components in open hardware community. The NVDLA RTL is modified and optimized for being integrated to OC-Accel framework, while the whole software stack of NVDLA is ported to OpenCAPI with kernel mode driver eliminated.  The proposed NVDLA+OpenCAPI solution is able to run various deep  neural networks  such as AlexNet and YOLO for image classification and object detection with competitive performance speedup.