SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR APPROXIMATION BASED OPTIMIZATION OF DATA PROCESSORS

摘要

A compilation system can apply a smoothness constraint to the arguments of a compute-bound function invoked in a software program, to ensure that the value(s) of one or more function arguments are within specified respective threshold(s) from selected nominal value(s). If the constraint is satisfied, the function invocation is replaced with an approximation thereof. The smoothness constraint may be determined for a range of value(s) of function argument(s) so as to determine a neighborhood within which the function can be replaced with an approximation thereof. The replacement of the function with an approximation thereof can facilitate simultaneous optimization of computation accuracy, performance, and energy/power consumption.

主权项

1. A method for optimizing performance of a processing system, the method comprising:
tiling a loop nest comprising at least one loop, each tile comprising a specified computation based on an argument, a value of the argument varying according to a tile index, a tile size being selected such that a difference between a value of the argument corresponding to a final tile index and a value of the argument corresponding to an initial tile index is at most equal to a threshold; employing an exact procedure implementing the specified computation for the initial tile index; employing an approximate procedure implementing the specified computation for each subsequent tile index, wherein a computation cost according to a cost metric of the approximate procedure is less than a computation cost according to that cost metric of the exact procedure.