Huawei Technologies Co., Limited

Baoqing Liu

Hu Liu

Qinglong Chen

Leijun He

Chao Lu

The present disclosure provides example operation accelerators and compression methods. One example operation accelerator includes a storage configured to store first input data, weight data, and a control instruction, and an operation circuit connected to the storage and configured to perform matrix multiplication on the first input data and the weight data, to obtain a computation result. The operation accelerator further includes a compression module configured to compress the computation result to obtain compressed data, as well as a controller connected to the storage and configured to obtain the control instruction from the storage, and when the control instruction includes instructions to compress the computation result, control the compression module to compress the computation result to obtain the compressed data. The operation accelerator further includes a direct memory access controller connected to the compression module and configured to store the compressed data in a memory outside the operation accelerator.

Operation accelerator and compression method

The present disclosure discloses example operation accelerators and compression methods. One example operation accelerator performs operations, including storing, in a first buffer, first input data. In a second buffer, weight data can be stored. A computation result is obtained by performing matrix multiplication on the first input data and the weight data by an operation circuit connected to the input buffer and the weight buffer. The computation result is compressed by a compression module to obtain compressed data. The compressed data can be stored into a memory outside the operation accelerator by a direct memory access controller (DMAC) connected to the compression module.

In the data compression method, a raw data block in raw data is processed based on a compression algorithm to obtain a standard compressed data block that has a length of L2 and that corresponds to the raw data block, and the raw data is further compressed into one or more standard compressed data blocks that each have the length of L2 and that are to be decompressed in parallel by a decompression apparatus, where the decompression apparatus includes a plurality of decompression engines, and each decompression engine is capable of decompressing one standard compressed data block within one processing cycle. According to the data compression method, a standard compressed data block with a fixed length can be obtained through compression.

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Hangzhou, China

Baoqing Liu