Dynamic DNNs Meet Runtime Resource Management on Mobile and Embedded Platforms

Deep neural network (DNN) inference is increasingly being executed on mobile and embedded platforms due to low latency and better privacy. However, efficient deployment on these platforms is challenging due to the intensive computation and memory access. We propose a holistic system design for DNN performance and energy optimisation, combining the trade-off opportunities in both algorithms and hardware. The system can be viewed as three abstract layers: the device layer contains heterogeneous computing resources; the application layer has multiple concurrent workloads; and the runtime resource management layer monitors the dynamically changing algorithms' performance targets as well as hardware resources and constraints, and tries to meet them by tuning the algorithm and hardware at the same time. Moreover, We illustrate the runtime approach through a dynamic version of 'once-for-all network' (namely Dynamic-OFA), which can scale the ConvNet architecture to fit heterogeneous computing resources efficiently and has good generalisation for different model architectures such as Transformer. Compared to the state-of-the-art Dynamic DNNs, our experimental results using ImageNet on a Jetson Xavier NX show that the Dynamic-OFA is up to 3.5x (CPU), 2.4x (GPU) faster for similar ImageNet Top-1 accuracy, or 3.8% (CPU), 5.1% (GPU) higher accuracy at similar latency. Furthermore, compared with Linux governor (e.g. performance, schedutil), our runtime approach reduces the energy consumption by 16.5% at similar latency.