Varifocal Storage: Dynamic Multiresolution Data Storage

Varifocal storage (VS) presents a new architecture that coordinates application demands, hardware accelerators, and intelligent data storage devices to efficiently support various input resolutions of system components, but still maintain the flexibility and quality without additional costs. Instead of faithfully shipping the raw data, the cross-layer design of VS allows an intelligent storage device to work directly with the running application to generate and deliver data sets in the desired resolution and quality before going through the narrower system interconnect. In this way, VS minimizes the bandwidth demand from the data source and allows hardware accelerators to work on received data without additional preprocessing. Without programmers’ hints, VS achieves 1.46× speedup on a computer with approximate hardware accelerators.