Acceleration of a Deep Neural Network for the Compact Muon Solenoid

Abstract

There are ongoing efforts to investigate theories that aim to explain the current shortcomings of the Standard Model of particle physics. One such effort is the Long-Lived Particle Jet Tagging Algorithm, based on a DNN (Deep Neural Network), which is used to search for exotic new particles. This paper describes two novel optimisations in the design of this DNN, suitable for implementation on an FPGA-based accelerator. The first involves the adoption of cyclic random access memories and the reuse of multiply-accumulate operations. The second involves storing matrices distributed over many RAM memories with elements grouped by index. An evaluation of the proposed methods and hardware architectures is also included. The proposed optimisations can yield performance enhancements by more than an order of magnitude compared to software implementations. The innovations can also lead to smaller FPGA footprints and accordingly reduce power consumption, allowing for instance duplication of compute units to achieve increases in effective throughput.