Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering

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CS 590/690 SEMINAR

 

Hardware acceleration of hashing algorithms using AMD NPUs

 

Berkan Şahin
Master Student
(Supervisor:Assoc.Prof.Can Alkan)

Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent University

Abstract: With the ongoing AI boom brought upon by large language models, hardware vendors are starting to include neural processing units (NPUs) in their mobile CPU and SoC designs. These co-processors are primarily designed for accelerating low-power, on-device machine learning inference; with simple and thoroughly parallelized architectures compared to CPUs. Our work focuses on investigating non machine learning workloads using these NPUs, with a focus on computational genomics applications. To this end we aim to accelerate the MurmurHash3 algorithm, which is a non-cryptographic hashing algorithm widely used for computational genomics applications, on AMD's AI Engine NPUs. We plan to provide a hardware-accelerated hashing library that can be used for porting applications, computational genomics or otherwise, on NPUs for energy-efficient and fast computation. We use the low-level IRON library to explicitly program the data movement and distribution required for parallelized hashing of many objects, taking advantage of the NPUs hardware-level data transformation capabilities.

 

DATE: April 06, Monday @ 16:50 Place: EA 502