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.