PNNU: parallel nearest-neighbor units for learned dictionaries

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Authors
Kung, H.T.
McDaniel, Bradley
Teerapittayanon, Surat
Subjects
Nearest neighbor
NNU
PNNU
Data analytics
Sparse coding
Learned dictionary
Parallel processing
Multi-core programming
Speedup
Matching pursuit
Signal processing
Computer vision
KTH
CIFAR
Advisors
Date of Issue
2015
Date
Publisher
Springer
Language
Abstract
We present a novel parallel approach, parallel nearest neighbor unit (PNNU), for finding the nearest member in a learned dictionary of high-dimensional features. This is a computation fundamental to machine learning and data analytics algorithms such as sparse coding for feature extraction. PNNU achieves high performance by using three techniques: (1) PNNU employs a novel fast table look up scheme to identify a small number of atoms as candidates from which the nearest neighbor of a query data vector can be found; (2) PNNU reduces computation cost by working with candidate atoms of reduced dimensionality; and (3) PNNU performs computations in parallel over multiple cores with low inter-core communication overheads. Based on e cient computation via techniques (1) and (2), technique (3) attains further speed up via parallel processing. We have implemented PNNU on multi-core ma- chines. We demonstrate its superior performance on three application tasks in signal processing and computer vision. For an action recognition task, PNNU achieves 41x overall performance gains on a 16-core compute server against a conventional serial implementation of nearest neighbor computation. Our PNNU software is available online as open source.
Type
Article
Description
Department
Organization
Harvard University
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Funded by Naval Postgraduate School
Intel Corporation
Funder
Agreement no. N00244-15-0050 (NPS)
Format
16 p.
Citation
H.T. Kung, B. McDaniel, S. Teerapittayanon, "PNNU: Parallel Nearest-Neighbor Units for Learned Dictionaries," International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing, Springer International Publishing, 2015.
Distribution Statement
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