MULTI-LAYER NEURAL NETWORK PROCESSING BY A NEURAL NETWORK ACCELERATOR USING HOST COMMUNICATED MERGED WEIGHTS AND A PACKAGE OF PER-LAYER INSTRUCTIONS

In the disclosed methods and systems for processing in a neural network system, a host computer system writes a plurality of weight matrices associated with a plurality of layers of a neural network to a memory shared with a neural network accelerator. The host computer system further assembles a plurality of per-layer instructions into an instruction package. Each per-layer instruction specifies processing of a respective layer of the plurality of layers of the neural network, and respective offsets of weight matrices in a shared memory. The host computer system writes input data and the instruction package to the shared memory. The neural network accelerator reads the instruction package from the shared memory and processes the plurality of per-layer instructions of the instruction package.