Machine Learning Hardware and Systems

Catalog description

This Master's level course will take a hardware-centric view of machine learning systems. From constrained embedded microcontrollers to large distributed multi-GPU systems, we will investigate how these platforms run machine learning algorithms. We will look at different levels of the hardware/software/algorithm stack to make modern machine learning systems possible. This includes understanding different hardware acceleration paradigms, common hardware optimizations such as low-precision arithmetic and sparsity, compilation methodologies, model compression methods such as pruning and distillation, and multi-device federated and distributed training. Through hands-on assignments and an open-ended project, students will develop a holistic view of what it takes to train and deploy a deep neural network.