FPGA Implementation for Large Scale Reservoir Computing based on Chaotic Boltzmann Machine

This paper reports on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of Chaotic Boltzmann Machine Reservoir Computing (CBM-RC). The reservoir will be large-scale, as it is expected to be applied to sensor information prediction for autonomous mobile robots. Therefore, we employ a design premised on storing the weight information into a large memory outside the FPGA. We propose an efficient compression method for the weight matrix and a parallel processing system, by considering both the characteristics of CBM-RC and the fact that the weight matrix of a large-scale reservoir is generally a sparse matrix. Our RC system, which has more than 8000 neurons and 1024 inputs/outputs, has been implemented on an AMD Alveo U50 FPGA board. This RC is the largest scale compared to those in related studies. We have performed the NARMA10 task and demonstrated that we can estimate 1024 predictions at once with NMSE accuracy that is even or better to conventional RC.