Zygarde: Time-Sensitive On-Device Deep Intelligence on Intermittently-Powered Systems

In this paper, we propose a time-, energy-, and accuracy-aware scheduling algorithm for intermittently powered systems that execute compressed deep learning tasks that are suitable for MCUs and are powered solely by harvested energy. The sporadic nature of harvested energy, resource constraints of the embedded platform, and the computational demand of deep neural networks (even though compressed) pose a unique and challenging real-time scheduling problem for which no solutions have been proposed in the literature. We empirically study the problem and model the energy harvesting pattern as well as the trade-off between the accuracy and execution of a deep neural network. We develop an imprecise computing-based scheduling algorithm that improves the schedulability of deep learning tasks on intermittently powered systems. We also utilize the dependency of the computational need of data samples for deep learning models and propose early termination of deep neural networks. We further propose a semi-supervised machine learning model that exploits the deep features and contributes in determining the imprecise partition of a task. We implement our proposed algorithms on two different datasets and real-life scenarios and show that it increases the accuracy by 9.45% - 3.19%, decreases the execution time by 14\% and successfully schedules 33%-12% more tasks.