Beam Orbital Parameter Prediction Based on the Deployment of Cascaded Neural Networks at Edge Intelligence Acceleration Nodes

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During the beam current calibration process, accurate guidance of the beam current to the metal target is a challenging issue for proton accelerators. To address this challenge, we propose the use of beam orbital parameters combined with reinforcement learning algorithms to achieve automatic beam calibration. This study introduces a system architecture that employs edge intelligent acceleration nodes based on deep learning acceleration techniques. We designed a system to predict BPM parameters using a cascaded backpropagation neural network (CBPNN) that is informed by the physical structure. This system serves as an environmental map for reinforcement learning, aiding beam current correction. The CBPNN was implemented on the acceleration node to hasten the forward inference process, leveraging sparsification, quantization algorithms, and pipelining techniques. Our experimental results demonstrated that the simulated inference speed reached 28 μs with FPGA hardware as the edge acceleration node, achieving forward inference speeds 35.66 and 12.66 times faster than those of the CPU and GPU. The energy efficiency ratio was 10.582 MOPS/W, which was 989 and 410 times that of the CPU and GPU, respectively. This confirms the designed architecture’s energy efficiency and low latency attributes.