A Computational Model for Tensor Core Units

Abstract

To respond to the need for efficient training and inference of deep neural networks, a plethora of domain-specific architectures have been introduced, such as Google Tensor Processing Units and NVIDIA Tensor Cores. A common feature of these architectures is the design for efficiently computing a dense matrix product of a given small size. In order to broaden the class of algorithms that exploit these systems, we propose a computational model, named the TCU model, that captures the ability to natively multiply small matrices. We then use the TCU model for designing fast algorithms for several problems, including dense and sparse matrix multiplication and the Discrete Fourier Transform. We finally highlight a relation between the TCU model and the external memory model.