Abstract: One embodiment provides for a computing device comprising a parallel processor compute unit to perform a set of parallel integer compute operations; a ternarization unit including a weight ternarization circuit and an activation quantization circuit; wherein the weight ternarization circuit is to convert a weight tensor from a floating-point representation to a ternary representation including a ternary weight and a scale factor; wherein the activation quantization circuit is to convert an activation tensor from a floating-point representation to an integer representation; and wherein the parallel processor compute unit includes one or more circuits to perform the set of parallel integer compute operations on the ternary representation of the weight tensor and the integer representation of the activation tensor.

Abstract: Technologies for artificial neural network training include a computing node with a host fabric interface that sends a message that includes one or more artificial neural network training algorithm values to another computing node in response to receipt of a request to send the message. Prior to sending the message, the host fabric interface may receive a request to quantize the message and quantize the message based on a quantization level included in the request to generate a quantized message. The quantization message includes one or more quantized values such that each quantized value has a lower precision than a corresponding artificial neural network training algorithm value. The host fabric interface then transmits the quantized message, which includes metadata indicative of the quantization level, to another computing node in response to quantization of the message for artificial neural network training. Other embodiments are described and claimed.