ApproxTuner: a compiler and runtime system for adaptive approximations

Manually optimizing the tradeoffs between accuracy, performance and energy for resource-intensive applications with flexible accuracy or precision requirements is extremely difficult. We present ApproxTuner, an automatic framework for accuracy-aware optimization of tensor-based applications while requiring only high-level end-to-end quality specifications. ApproxTuner implements and manages approximations in algorithms, system software, and hardware.

The key contribution in ApproxTuner is a novel threephase approach to approximation-tuning that consists of development-time, install-time, and run-time phases. Our approach decouples tuning of hardware-independent and hardware-specific approximations, thus providing retargetability across devices. To enable efficient autotuning of approximation choices, we present a novel accuracy-aware tuning technique called predictive approximation-tuning, which