Title:
ExpAX: A Framework for Automating Approximate Programming
ExpAX: A Framework for Automating Approximate Programming
Author(s)
Park, Jongse
Zhang, Xin
Ni, Kangqi
Esmaeilzadeh, Hadi
Naik, Mayur
Zhang, Xin
Ni, Kangqi
Esmaeilzadeh, Hadi
Naik, Mayur
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Abstract
We present ExpAX, a framework for automating approximate
programming. ExpAX consists of these three components:
(1) a programming model based on a new kind of program
specification, which we refer to as error expectations.
Our programming model enables programmers to implicitly
relax the accuracy constraints without explicitly marking operations
as approximate; (2) an approximation safety analysis
that automatically infers a safe-to-approximate set of
program operations; and (3) an optimization that automatically
marks a subset of the safe-to-approximate operations
as approximate while statistically adhering to the error expectations.
We evaluate ExpAX on a diverse set of Java applications.
The results show that ExpAX provides significant
energy savings (up to 35%) with large reduction in programmer
effort (between 3x to 113x ) while providing formal
safety and statistical quality-of-result guarantees.
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Date Issued
2014
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Text
Resource Subtype
Technical Report