HyperCut: Fast Inter-Layer Scheduling via Directed Hypergraph and Early Filtering
As deep neural networks (DNNs) continue to scale, inter-layer scheduling, which orchestrates the spatial allocation of compute resources and the temporal execution order across layers, has become a decisive factor in sustaining high utilization and energy efficiency on tiled accelerators. However, existing inter-layer schedulers defer cost feedback until a complete fine-grained intra-layer scheduling has been resolved. The resulting decoupled flow repeatedly explores sub-optimal or even infeasible inter-layer schedules, and the absence of early pruning during the inter-layer phase remains a critical bottleneck for design-space exploration (DSE) in DNN compilers. Our key observation is that the cost of an intra-layer scheduling can be tightly upper-bounded once the inter-layer cut fixes the sub-mesh shape, which lets us cost every inter-layer candidate without solving the intra-layer problem. Hence, we propose a hierarchical partitioning-and-mapping framework, HyperCut, that enables early filtering of inter-layer schedules based on hypergraph partitioning. Based on the directed hypergraph (DHG) abstraction of DNN, we introduce a unified representation, State, that jointly encodes the DHG partition, tile mesh allocation and tensor batch splitting. Thereby, partitioning and mapping are coupled into a union optimization object. For a DNN with N layers, the resulting theoretical design space is bounded by O(N), compared with O(9.899^N) for the state-of-the-art open-source scheduler SET. Across 10 evaluated cases, HyperCut achieves 2.0x performance improvement and 80.47% exploration time reduction over the SET baseline, measured by geometric mean.