HDCC: A Hyperdimensional Computing compiler for classification on embedded systems and high-performance computing

Abstract

Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) is a bio-inspired computing framework that has gained increasing attention, especially as a more efficient approach to machine learning (ML). This work introduces the \name{} compiler, the first open-source compiler that translates high-level descriptions of HDC classification methods into optimized C code. The code generated by the proposed compiler has three main features for embedded systems and High-Performance Computing: (1) it is self-contained and has no library or platform dependencies; (2) it supports multithreading and single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instructions using C intrinsics; (3) it is optimized for maximum performance and minimal memory usage. \name{} is designed like a modern compiler, featuring an intuitive and descriptive input language, an intermediate representation (IR), and a retargetable backend. This makes \name{} a valuable tool for research and applications exploring HDC for classification tasks on embedded systems and High-Performance Computing. To substantiate these claims, we conducted experiments with HDCC on several of the most popular datasets in the HDC literature. The experiments were run on four different machines, including different hyperparameter configurations, and the results were compared to a popular prototyping library built on PyTorch. The results show a training and inference speedup of up to 132x, averaging 25x across all datasets and machines. Regarding memory usage, using 10240-dimensional hypervectors, the average reduction was 5x, reaching up to 14x. When considering vectors of 64 dimensions, the average reduction was 85x, with a maximum of 158x less memory utilization.