Approximate Computing

This book explores the technological developments at various levels of abstraction, of the new paradigm of approximate computing. The authors describe in a single-source the state-of-the-art, covering the entire spectrum of research activities in approximate computing, bridging device, circuit, architecture, and system levels. Content includes tutorials, reviews and surveys of current theoretical/experimental results, design methodologies and applications developed in approximate computing for a wide scope of readership and specialists. Serves as a single-source reference to state-of-the-art of approximate computing; Covers broad range of topics, from circuits to applications; Includes contributions by leading researchers, from academia and industry.

This book serves as a single-source reference to the latest advances in Approximate Computing (AxC), a promising technique for increasing performance or reducing the cost and power consumption of a computing system. The authors discuss the different AxC design and validation techniques, and their integration. They also describe real AxC applications, spanning from mobile to high performance computing and also safety-critical applications.

This book introduces the concept of approximate computing for software and hardware designs and its impact on the reliability of embedded systems. It presents approximate computing methods and proposes approximate fault tolerance techniques applied to programmable hardware and embedded software to provide reliability at low computational costs. The book also presents fault tolerance techniques based on approximate computing, thus presenting how approximate computing can be applied to safety-critical systems.

This book focuses on computing devices and their design at various levels to combat variability. The authors provide a review of key concepts with particular emphasis on timing errors caused by various variability sources. They discuss methods to predict and prevent, detect and correct, and finally conditions under which such errors can be accepted; they also consider their implications on cost, performance and quality. Coverage includes a comparative evaluation of methods for deployment across various layers of the system from circuits, architecture, to application software. These can be combined in various ways to achieve specific goals related to observability and controllability of the variability effects, providing means to achieve cross layer or hybrid resilience.

Professor Jozef Gruska is a well known computer scientist for his many and broad results. He was the father of theoretical computer science research in Czechoslovakia and among the first Slovak programmers in the early 1960s. Jozef Gruska introduced the descriptional complexity of grammars, automata, and languages, and is one of the pioneers of parallel (systolic) automata. His other main research interests include parallel systems and automata, as well as quantum information processing, transmission, and cryptography. He is co-founder of four regular series of conferences in informatics and two in quantum information processing and the Founding Chair (1989-96) of the IFIP Specialist Group on Foundations of Computer Science.

This book describes reliable and efficient design automation techniques for the design and implementation of an approximate computing system. The authors address the important facets of approximate computing hardware design - from formal verification and error guarantees to synthesis and test of approximation systems. They provide algorithms and methodologies based on classical formal verification, synthesis and test techniques for an approximate computing IC design flow. This is one of the first books in Approximate Computing that addresses the design automation aspects, aiming for not only sketching the possibility, but providing a comprehensive overview of different tasks and especially how they can be implemented.

This book presents recent advances towards the goal of enabling efficient implementation of machine learning models on resource-constrained systems, covering different application domains. The focus is on presenting interesting and new use cases of applying machine learning to innovative application domains, exploring the efficient hardware design of efficient machine learning accelerators, memory optimization techniques, illustrating model compression and neural architecture search techniques for energy-efficient and fast execution on resource-constrained hardware platforms, and understanding hardware-software codesign techniques for achieving even greater energy, reliability, and performance benefits.

This book discusses and compares several new trends that can be used to overcome Moore’s law limitations, including Neuromorphic, Approximate, Parallel, In Memory, and Quantum Computing. The author shows how these paradigms are used to enhance computing capability as developers face the practical and physical limitations of scaling, while the demand for computing power keeps increasing. The discussion includes a state-of-the-art overview and the essential details of each of these paradigms.