FPGA-accelerated dense linear machine learning: A precision-convergence trade-off

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a commonly used algorithm for training linear machine learning models. Based on vector algebra, it benefits from the inherent parallelism available in an FPGA. In this paper, we first present a single-precision floating-point SGD implementation on an FPGA that provides similar performance as a 10-core CPU. We then adapt the design to make it capable of processing low-precision data. The low-precision data is obtained from a novel compression scheme - called stochastic quantization, specifically designed for machine learning applications. We test both full-precision and low-precision designs on various regression and classification data sets. We achieve up to an order of magnitude training speedup when using low-precision data compared to a full-precision SGD on the same FPGA and a state-of-the-art multi-core solution, while maintaining the quality of training. We open source the designs presented in this paper.