Title:
Expectation-Oriented Framework for Automating Approximate Programming
Expectation-Oriented Framework for Automating Approximate Programming
Author(s)
Esmaeilzadeh, Hadi
Ni, Kangqi
Naik, Mayur
Ni, Kangqi
Naik, Mayur
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Abstract
This paper describes ExpAX, a framework for automating approximate programming based on programmer-specified error expectations. Three components constitute ExpAX: (1) a programming
model based on a new kind of program specification, which we refer to as
expectations. Our programming model enables programmers to implicitly relax the accuracy constraints without explicitly
marking operations approximate; (2) a novel approximation safety analysis that automatically identifies a safe-to-approximate subset of the program operations; and (3) an optimization that automatically marks a subset of the safe-to-approximate operations as approximate while considering the error expectation. Further, we formulate the process of automatically marking operations as approximate as an optimization problem and provide a genetic algorithm to
solve it. We evaluate ExpAX using a diverse set of applications and
show that it can provide significant energy savings while improving
the quality-of-result degradation. ExpAX automatically excludes
the safe-to-approximate operations that if approximated lead to significant quality degradation.
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Date Issued
2013
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Text
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Technical Report