Approximate Computing and the Efficient Machine Learning Expedition

Approximate computing Approximate computing (AxC) has been long accepted as a design refers to techniques that exploit the inherent error resilience alternative for efficient system implementation at the cost of relaxed of several applications to achieve improvements in efficiency (e.g., accuracy requirements. Despite the AxC research activities energy and performance) at all layers of the computing stack [60]. in various application domains, AxC thrived the past decade when For example, prior analysis on a benchmark suite of 12 recognition, it was applied in Machine Learning (ML). The by definition approximate mining and search applications showed that 83% of the runtime is notion of ML models but also the increased computational spent in tasks that are amenable to approximation [15, 60]. The origins overheads associated with ML applications-that were effectively of approximate computing (AxC) can be traced back to various mitigated by corresponding approximations-led to a perfect matching fields including computer arithmetic (floating point representation) and a fruitful synergy. AxC for AI/ML has transcended beyond [63], arithmetic units (adders [54] and multipliers [80]), digital academic prototypes. In this work, we enlighten the synergistic signal processing (filter design) [27], algorithms (approximation nature of AxC and ML and elucidate the impact of AxC in designing algorithms) [62], and networking (best-effort packet delivery) [9].