The invention is notably directed to a method of
processing data at a hardware accelerator device (or "accelerator" for short). The accelerator (1) includes
processing means (2) and an in-memory computing (IMC) device (10). The IMC device has a
crossbar array structure of cells, which are designed to store weight values. The method comprises the following steps, which are performed at the accelerator. To start with,
data encoding decompression parameters and weight values are received at the accelerator. The weight values are assumed to have been compressed according to a multimode compression scheme, whereby the received data include distinct subsets of the weight values that have been compressed according to respective compression
modes. Next, the distinct subsets of the weight values are decompressed using said
processing means (2), based on respective decompression
modes that are selected in accordance with the decompression parameters. The decompression
modes correspond to said compression modes. I.e., a given decompression mode can be regarded as the reciprocal of the corresponding compression mode. The decompressed weight values are subsequently stored across the cells. Eventually, vector-matrix multiplications are performed through to the
crossbar array structure (10) as multiply-accumulate operations based on the stored weight values. The above solution leads to reduced
data transmission and local storage requirements. Compressed data are transmitted more efficiently and more rapidly to the accelerator, something that is notably beneficial to
machine learning (ML) applications. Also, the accelerator can locally store more compressed data (all things being otherwise equal), prior to decompressing such data. Interestingly, the received data can be proactively decompressed in situ, while the IMC device performs VMMs based on weight values that are currently active. Furthermore, the VMMs are efficiently performed, in-memory, by the
crossbar array structure of the IMC device. The invention is further directed to related accelerator devices and
computer program products.