The Role of Precision for Iterative Refinement

Programmers often use excessive precision in scientific computation causing substantial waste of performance. Computational precision has great influence on performance, but there has been a dearth of research that explores performance as a function of precision. In this paper, we describe the performance gain as a function of precision with a scientific computing application, mixed precision iterative refinement. Utilizing computational precision in mixed precision iterative refinement can achieve significant performance gain without losing accuracy on accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs.