Architecture of an FPGA accelerator for LDA-based inference

Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) based topic inference is a data classification method, that is used efficiently for extremely large data sets. However, the processing time is very large due to the serial computational behavior of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method used for the topic inference. We propose a pipelined hardware architecture and memory allocation scheme to accelerate LDA using parallel processing. The proposed architecture is implemented on a reconfigurable hardware called FPGA (field programmable gate array), using OpenCL design environment. According to the experimental results, we achieved maximum speed-up of 2.38 times, while maintaining the same quality compared to the conventional CPU-based implementation.