Accelergy infrastructure (version 0.2)

An infrastructure for architecture-level energy estimations of accelerator designs. Project website: http://accelergy.mit.edu

Get started

Infrastructure tested on RedHat Linux, Ubuntu, MacOS
Required packages
- Python >= 3.6
- PyYAML >= 1.1 (dependency automatically handled at installation)
- yamlordereddictloader >= 0.4 (dependency automatically handled at installation)

Install the package

   <pip_exec> install .
   # note:<pip_exec> is different for different python versions, e.g., pip3

Please make sure your python bin, e.g.,~/.local/bin , is appropriately added to $PATH
A new command: accelergy should be available in your python bin
accelergy -h shows the help message for the command

Run an example evaluation

accelergy generates the appropriate outputs according to the available input files.

# To run both ERT generator and energy calculator
cd examples/simple_v0.2/input
accelergy -o ../output/ *.yaml components/*.yaml 

# To run just the ERT generator
accelergy -o ../otuput/ design.yaml components/*.yaml 

# To run just the energy calculator
accelergy -o ../output ../output/ERT.yaml action_counts.yaml

Input files

There are three types of input files:

architecture description (unique)

artchitecture_description:  # required top-key
  version: 0.2              # required version number
  subtree:                  # required architecture tree root
    ...

compound component class description (can be composed of multiple files)

compound_components: # required top-key
  version: 0.2       # required version number
  classes:           # required list identifier
    - name: ...      # various compound component classes specified as a list
    ...

action counts (can be composed of multiple files)

compound_components: # required top-key
  version: 0.2       # required version number
  subtree:           # required architecture tree root
    - name: ...      # various action counts specified as a list
    ...

Accelergy parses the input files and decide what operations to perform:

Providing all three types of inputs will allow Accelergy to generate the ERTs for the components in the design, and perform energy estimations using the workload-generated action counts.
Providing just the architecture description and compound component class description allows Accelergy to generate the ERTs for the components in the design.
Providing the generated ERTs and the action counts allows Accelergy to directly generate energy estimations if the components in the design.

Input flags

Accelergy accepts several optional flags:

-o : specifies the output directory. Default is current directory
-p : specified the precision of the calculated ERTs and estimations. Default is 3.
-v: once set to 1, it allows Accelergy to output the interactions with the estimation plug-ins, including the primitive component information, the selected estimation plug-in name, and the estimated energy returned from the plug-in.
-s: once set to 1, it allows Accelergy to output an ERT summary that contains the avg, min, and max for the actions of the components in the architecture.
--enable_flattened_arch : once set to 1, it allows Accelergy to output an architecture summary in the output directory and check the validity of component names in the action counts file. The flattened architecture includes all the interpreted attribute values and classes for all the components in the design. Default is 0.

File Structure

accelergy : package source
share: contains directories for default primitive component libraries and dummy estimation pug-ins
examples: example designs and action counts for Accelergy to evaluate

Documentation

accelergy_config.yaml

accelergy-config.yaml is the required config file for Accelergy to:

locate its estimator plug-ins
locate its primitive components

At the beginning of accelergy run, Accelergy will automatically search for accelergy_config.yaml first at ./ and then at $HOME/.config/accelergy/ the file will be loaded if found, otherwise, Accelergy will create a default accelergy_config.yaml at $HOME/.config/accelergy/, which points to the root directories of the default estimator plug-in directory and primitive component library directory.

Primitive component library files need be end with .lib.yaml for Accelergy to locate it. find correspondence.

API for Estimation Plug-ins

Users need to specify the root directory in config file in the format below. Accelergy does a recursive search to locate the estimator plug-ins according to the provided root directories

estimator_plug_ins:
  - root0
  - root1

.estimator.yaml file needs to be specified for Accelergy to locate the estimator, and the file should have the following format

  version: <version_number> 
  estimator_plug_in_name:
    module:  <wrapper file name>
    class:   <class to be imported>
    parameter: <initialization values>  #optional, only specified if the estimator plug-in needs input for __init__()

A python module is required to be present in the same folder as the .estimator.yaml file
- The python file should contain a class as specified in .estimator.yaml
- There are two required class functions, i.e., the interface function calls. Accelergy specifically calls these two functions to check if the estimator plug-in can be used for a specific primitive component
  - primitive_action_supported(self, interface)
    - parameters: interface is a dictionary that contains the following four keys:
      - class_name, type string
      - attributes, type dictionary {attribute_name: attribute_value}
      - action_name, type string
      - arguments, type dictionary {argument_name: argument_value}
        
        None if the action does not need arguments
    - return: integer accuracy if supported (0 is not supported)
  - estimate_energy(self, interface)
    - parameters: same interface
    - return: the energy/action value
- Accelergy is unaware of the other functions that are implemented in this module

LinShihJhang/accelergy