CaMDN: Enhancing Cache Efficiency for Multi-tenant DNNs on Integrated NPUs

TL;DR

CaMDN is a co-design architecture that improves cache efficiency for multi-tenant DNNs on integrated NPUs by reducing cache contention and optimizing cache utilization, leading to significant performance gains.

Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture-scheduling co-design with a lightweight cache partitioning and dynamic scheduling method for multi-tenant DNNs on NPUs.

Findings

Reduces memory access by 33.4% on average.

Achieves up to 2.56× speedup for co-located DNNs.

Improves cache utilization and performance in multi-tenant environments.

Abstract

With the rapid development of DNN applications, multi-tenant execution, where multiple DNNs are co-located on a single SoC, is becoming a prevailing trend. Although many methods are proposed in prior works to improve multi-tenant performance, the impact of shared cache is not well studied. This paper proposes CaMDN, an architecture-scheduling co-design to enhance cache efficiency for multi-tenant DNNs on integrated NPUs. Specifically, a lightweight architecture is proposed to support model-exclusive, NPU-controlled regions inside shared cache to eliminate unexpected cache contention. Moreover, a cache scheduling method is proposed to improve shared cache utilization. In particular, it includes a cache-aware mapping method for adaptability to the varying available cache capacity and a dynamic allocation algorithm to adjust the usage among co-located DNNs at runtime. Compared to prior works, CaMDN reduces the memory access by 33.4% on average and achieves a model speedup of up to 2.56$\times$ (1.88$\times$ on average).