Voyager SDK Effortless deployment
of AI applications to the Edge
End-to-end integrated software stack
The VoyagerTM SDK is purpose-built for Computer Vision at the Edge and enables customers to solve their AI business requirements by effortlessly deploying AI on edge devices. Customers use the SDK to bring their applications into the Metis AI platform and run it on Axelera's powerful Metis AI Processing Unit (AIPU), whether the application is developed using proprietary or standard industry models. The Voyager™ SDK offers end-to-end integration and is API-compatible with de-facto industry standards, unleashing the potential of the Metis AIPU, delivering high-performance AI that can be deployed quickly and easily.
Voyager SDK is currently only available for customers that ordered our Metis Evaluation Systems.
Optimized deployment
The VoyagerTM SDK makes it easy to build high-performance applications for edgedevices. Developers describe their end-to-end application pipelines in a simple human-readable high-level declarative language YAML. Included in the YAML description can be one or more neural networks with their corresponding pre & post-processing tasks, which can contian sophisticated image processing operations. The SDK automatically compiles, optimizes and deploys the entire pipeline, making use of host processors (CPU, embedded GPU or media accelerator) and AIPU as required. The Voyager™ SDK supports a wide range of host architectures and platforms to meet the requirements of diverse Edge application environments. In addition, the SDK can flexibly embed a pipeline into an inference service to obtain a variety of preconfigured, out-of-the-box solutions, ranging from fully embedded use cases, to distributed processing of multiple 4K streams.
Model Zoo
The VoyagerTM SDK comes with a Model Zoo, a catalog of state-of-the-art AI models and turnkey pipelines for real-world use cases including image classification, object detection, segmentation, keypoint detection, face recognition and other Computer Vision tasks. This freely accessible catalog is continuously updated and improved with support for the latest models, covering a broad range of market verticals and use cases. Importantly, developers can easily modify any of the offered models to work with their own datasets or make them fit better to their application requirements. In addition to access via the web, access to the Model Zoo is seamlessly integrated within the SDK enabling effortless importing of Model Zoo content to the application under development.
Under the hood
The VoyagerTM SDK builds on industry-standard APIs and open-source frameworks, enhanced with advanced capabilities by Axelera’s R&D team. Voyager’s Machine Learning compiler, built on the Apache TVM compiler framework, automates the compilation and optimization of models for the Metis AI Processing Unit. The compiler inputs models pretrained in industry-standard frameworks such as PyTorch, and outputs code tuned for Metis hardware. During compilation, the compiler quantizes the model using proprietary, state-of-the-art algorithms and partitions the model for optimal execution on Metis AIPU. Without manual intervention, the compiler generates code with an accuracy practically indistinguishable from the original model. Similarly, pipelines use the open source framework GStreamer and whilst the vast majority of users need not understand any of the internals of generated pipelines, the open nature of the stack allows expert users to customize the generated code for a specific use case.
Applications deployed with Voyager onto the Metis AIPU have the highest performance and energy efficiency, while retaining equivalent accuracy of the original FP32 model.
Read on
AI at the Edge: A fast, accurate and effortless journey with Voyager SDK
February 27, 2023
