Doing Moore with Less -- Leapfrogging Moore's Law with Inexactness for Supercomputing

Understand

Energy and power consumption are major limitations to continued scaling of computing systems.

• Inexactness, where the quality of the solution can be traded for energy savings, has been proposed as an approach to overcoming those limitations.
• In the past, however, inexactness necessitated the need for highly customized or specialized hardware.
• The current evolution of commercial off-the-shelf(COTS) processors facilitates the use of lower-precision arithmetic in ways that reduce energy consumption.