Centaur: A Chiplet-based, Hybrid Sparse-Dense Accelerator for Personalized Recommendations
Ranggi Hwang, Taehun Kim, Youngeun Kwon, Minsoo Rhu
Abstract
Personalized recommendations are the backbone machine learning (ML) algorithm that powers several important application domains (e.g., ads, e-commerce, etc) serviced from cloud datacenters. Sparse embedding layers are a crucial building block in designing recommendations yet little attention has been paid in properly accelerating this important ML algorithm. This paper first provides a detailed workload characterization on personalized recommendations and identifies two significant performance limiters: memory-intensive embedding layers and compute-intensive multi-layer perceptron (MLP) layers. We then present Centaur, a chiplet-based hybrid sparse-dense accelerator that addresses both the memory throughput challenges of embedding layers and the compute limitations of MLP layers. We implement and demonstrate our proposal on an Intel HARPv2, a package-integrated CPU+FPGA device, which shows a 1.7-17.2× performance speedup and 1.7-19.5× energy efficiency improvement than conventional approaches.