Personalized recommendation for content ranking is now largely accomplished leveraging deep neural networks. However, despite the importance of these models and the amount of compute cycles they consume, relatively little research attention has been devoted to systems for recommendation. To facilitate research and to advance the understanding of these workloads, this paper presents a set of real-world, production-scale DNNs for personalized recommendation coupled with relevant performance metrics for evaluation. In addition to releasing a set of open-source workloads, we conduct in-depth analysis that underpins future system design and optimization for at-scale recommendation: Inference latency varies by 60% across three Intel server generations, batching and co-location of inferences can drastically improve latency-bounded throughput, and the diverse composition of recommendation models leads to different optimization strategies.

MaxNVM is a principled co-design of sparse encodings, protective logic, and fault-prone MLC eNVM technologies (i.e., RRAM and CTT) to enable highly-efficient DNN inference. We find bit reduction techniques (e.g., clustering and sparse compression) increase weight vulnerability to faults. This limits the capabilities of MLC eNVM. To circumvent this limitation, we improve storage density (i.e., bits-per-cell) with minimal overhead using protective logic. Tradeoffs between density and reliability result in a rich design space. We show that by balancing these techniques, the weights of large networks are able to reasonably fit on-chip.

Unlike fully-connected layers with single vector matrix operations, RNN layers consist of hundreds of such operations chained over time. This poses challenges unique to RNNs that are not found in convolutional neural networks  models, namely large dynamic activation. In this paper we present MASR, a principled and modular architecture that accelerates bidirectional RNNs for on-chip ASR. MASR is designed to exploit sparsity in both dynamic activations and static weights. The architecture is enhanced by a series of dynamic activation optimizations that enable compact storage, ensure no energy is wasted computing null operations, and maintain high MAC utilization for highly parallel accelerator designs.