GPGCN: A General-Purpose Graph Convolution Neural Network Accelerator Based on RISC-V ISA Extension

Abstract

In the past two years, various graph convolution neural networks (GCNs) accelerators have emerged, each with their own characteristics, but their common disadvantage is that the hardware architecture is not programmable and it is optimized for a specific network and dataset. They may not support acceleration for different GCNs and may not achieve optimal hardware resource utilization for datasets of different sizes. Therefore, given the above shortcomings, and according to the development trend of traditional neural network accelerators, this paper proposes and implements GPGCN: a general-purpose GCNs accelerator architecture based on RISC-V instruction set extension, providing the software programming freedom to support acceleration for various GCNs, and achieving the best acceleration efficiency for different GCNs with different datasets. Compared with traditional CPU, and traditional CPU with vector expansion, GPGCN achieves above 1001×, 267× speedup for GCN with the Cora dataset. Compared with dedicated accelerators, GPGCN has software programmability and supports the acceleration of more GCNs.