This week I (Kunal) along with James worked on the I/O portion of the project. James helped me on host-side programming for the U96 board, and provided me with various resources to look at, so that I can get going with the implementation.
James attempted to make further gains of the CNN kernel, but it was not as successful this week. However, he has worked out various strategies which will help speedup our implementation, and has been attempting to implement those strategies. He also worked with Joshua to research pre-trained models. He also setup a git to help Kunal with his portion of the project.
Joshua worked on researching pre-trained models along with James, and also attempted to get AWS up and running, but after testing Google Colab, decided to go with that instead. Our request came back but was not fully fulfilled, as we weren’t provided with enough vCPU limits to use our preferred instance, so after purchasing Google Colab Pro, he decided to use that instead to speed up the training process.
In terms of the whole project, we almost have a working CNN model. The training should be done by around Wednesday/Thursday this week, and James and I will be working extensively on CNN acceleration before then, and then take our weights/hyperparameters from our software model and implement them this coming Friday/weekend to ensure everything is going smoothly. Overall, our project is around a week behind, but we are confident it will go smoothly as we have worked out enough slack time, and also addressed the issues that were preventing our project from moving forward.