A Co-Scheduling Framework for DNN Models on Mobile and Edge Devices With Heterogeneous Hardware

With the emergence of more and more powerful chipsets and hardware and the rise of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT), there is a growing trend for bringing Deep Neural Network (DNN) models to empower mobile and edge devices with intelligence such that they can support attractive AI applications on the edge in a real-time or near real-time manner. To leverage heterogeneous computational resources (such as CPU, GPU, DSP, etc) to effectively and efficiently support concurrent inference of multiple DNN models on a mobile or edge device, we propose a novel online Co-Scheduling framework based on deep REinforcement Learning (DRL), which we call COSREL. COSREL has the following desirable features: 1) it achieves significant speedup over commonly-used methods by efficiently utilizing all the computational resources on heterogeneous hardware; 2) it leverages emerging Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to make dynamic and wise online scheduling decisions based on system runtime state; 3) it is capable of making a good tradeoff among inference latency, throughput and energy efficiency; and 4) it makes no changes to given DNN models, thus preserves their accuracies. To validate and evaluate COSREL, we conduct extensive experiments on an off-the-shelf Android smartphone with widely-used DNN models to compare it with three commonly-used baselines. Our experimental results show that 1) COSREL consistently and significantly outperforms all the baselines in terms of both throughput and latency; and 2) COSREL is generally superior to all the baselines in terms of energy efficiency.