Featured Activities

Doing Moore with Less – Leapfrogging Moore’s Law with Inexactness for Supercomputing

WORKSHOP: Post Moore’s Era Supercomputing

Presenters: Sven Leyffer, Stefan M. Wild, Mike Fagan, Marc Snir, Krishna Palem, Yoshii Kazutomo, Hal Finkel
Time: Sunday, November 11th, 2pm – 2:20pm
Location: C155

Description: We investigate the use of inexactness, to trade solution quality with energy savings to reduce power consumption in HPC systems, using commercial off-the-shelf processors for lower-precision arithmetic. We implement an inexact Newton algorithm for solving nonlinear equations to show how to reinvest energy savings to improve solution quality. We provide an analytical model to explain our findings, and provide a justification for using nonstandard half-precision arithmetic for ill-conditioned problems.

Doing Moore with Less at SC18