International Business Machines Corporation
ReLU compression to reduce GPU memory

Abstract:

A method is presented for compressing data of a Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) function on a graphical processing unit (GPU) employed in a learning process of a deep neural network. The method includes converting an initial data structure including nonzero data and zero data into a compressed data structure including only the nonzero data of the initial data structure as compressed data by generating a nonzero data bitmap region, generating a nonzero data number table region by employing a parallel reduction algorithm, calculating a nonzero data array index per block region of all blocks from the nonzero data number table region by employing a parallel prefix sum scan algorithm, allocating a buffer for the compressed data; and copying the nonzero data from the initial data structure into a nonzero data array region in a compressed data format in parallel.