Opportunities for Energy Efficient Computing: A Study of Inexact General Purpose Processors for High-Performance and Big-data Applications Peter Düben Jeremy Schlachter AOPP, University of Oxford EPFL Oxford, United Kingdom Lausanne, Switzerland
[email protected] [email protected] Parishkrati, Sreelatha Yenugula, John Augustine Christian Enz Indian Institute of Technology Madras EPFL India Lausanne, Switzerland
[email protected],
[email protected] [email protected],
[email protected] K. Palem T. N. Palmer Electrical Engineering and Computer Science AOPP, University of Oxford Rice University, Houston, USA Oxford, United Kingdom
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract—In this paper, we demonstrate that disproportionate hardware artifacts such as adders, multiplier or FFT engines gains are possible through a simple devise for injecting inexactness [22], [23], [20], [21]. For additional references on inexact or approximation into the hardware architecture of a computing hardware, architectures and related topics, please also see [1], system with a general purpose template including a complete [32], [12], [39], [35], [2]. More recently, this work has also memory hierarchy. The focus of the study is on energy savings been extended to evaluations of large-scale applications—in possible through this approach in the context of large and challenging applications. We choose two such from different ends of the context of our own group, climate modeling and weather the computing spectrum—the IGCM model for weather and climate prediction served as the driving example in which the floating modeling which embodies significant features of a high-performance point operations were rendered inexact [9].