Namacha: A software development environment for a multi-chip convolutional network accelerator

A building block convolutional neural network accelerator consists of a host and multiple accelerator chips which can scale the performance by changing the number of stacked chips. In order to program the host and the accelerators, an integrated programming development environment called NAMACHA is proposed. It includes compilers for convolutional neural network accelerators and a system level simulator including inter-chip communication latency. On the simulator, the total application runs 4390x faster than that of the logic level simulation with 1.27% difference of clock cycle counts.