NNL:a domain-specific language for neural networks

Recent years,neural networks ( NNs) have received increasing attention from both academia and industry.So far significant diversity among existing NNs as well as their hardware platforms makes NN programming a daunting task.In this paper,a domain-specific language ( DSL) for NNs,neural network language ( NNL) is proposed to deliver productivity of NN programming and portable performance of NN execution on different hardware platforms.The productivity and flexibility of NN programming are enabled by abstracting NNs as a directed graph of blocks.The language describes 4 representative and widely used NNs and runs them on 3 different hardware platforms ( CPU,GPU and NN accelerator) .Experimental results show that NNs written with the proposed language are,on average,14.5％ better than the baseline implementations across these 3 platforms.Moreover,compared with the Caffe framework that specifically targets the GPU platform,the code can achieve similar performance.