Towards automatic significance analysis for approximate computing

Several applications may trade-off output quality for energy efficiency by computing only an approximation of their output. Current approaches to software-based approximate computing often require the programmer to specify parts of the code or data structures that can be approximated. A largely unaddressed challenge is how to automate the analysis of the significance of code for the output quality. To this end, we propose a methodology and toolset for automatic significance analysis. We use interval arithmetic and algorithmic differentiation in our profile-driven yet mathematical approach to evaluate the significance of input and intermediate variables for the output of a computation. Our methodology effectively matches decisions of a domain expert in significance characterization for a set of benchmarks, and in some cases offers new insights. Evaluation of the software infrastructure on a multicore x86 platform shows energy reduction (from 31% up to 91% with a mean of 56%) compared to fully accurate execution, with graceful quality degradation.