A significance-driven programming framework for energy-constrained approximate computing

Vassilis Vassiliadis, Charalampos Chalios, Konstantinos Parasyris, Christos D. Antonopoulos, Spyros Lalis, Nikolaos Bellas, Hans Vandierendonck, Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos
2015 Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers - CF '15  
Approximate execution is a viable technique for energy-constrained environments, provided that applications have the mechanisms to produce outputs of the highest possible quality within the given energy budget. We introduce a framework for energy-constrained execution with controlled and graceful quality loss. A simple programming model allows users to express the relative importance of computations for the quality of the end result, as well as minimum quality requirements. The
more » ... e runtime system uses an application-specific analytical energy model to identify the degree of concurrency and approximation that maximizes quality while meeting user-specified energy constraints. Evaluation on a dual-socket 8-core server shows that the proposed framework predicts the optimal configuration with high accuracy, enabling energy-constrained executions that result in significantly higher quality compared to loop perforation, a compiler approximation technique.
doi:10.1145/2742854.2742857 dblp:conf/cf/VassiliadisCPAL15 fatcat:bqmzdg3r5zgozedwtfrdrcuviu