A Survey of Techniques for Approximate Computing
Top Cited Papers
Open Access
- 18 March 2016
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in ACM Computing Surveys
- Vol. 48 (4), 1-33
- https://doi.org/10.1145/2893356
Abstract
Approximate computing trades off computation quality with effort expended, and as rising performance demands confront plateauing resource budgets, approximate computing has become not merely attractive, but even imperative. In this article, we present a survey of techniques for approximate computing (AC). We discuss strategies for finding approximable program portions and monitoring output quality, techniques for using AC in different processing units (e.g., CPU, GPU, and FPGA), processor components, memory technologies, and so forth, as well as programming frameworks for AC. We classify these techniques based on several key characteristics to emphasize their similarities and differences. The aim of this article is to provide insights to researchers into working of AC techniques and inspire more efforts in this area to make AC the mainstream computing approach in future systems.Keywords
Funding Information
- Advanced Scientific Computing Research
- U.S. Department of Energy
- Office of Science
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