Monitoring and Debugging the Quality of Results in Approximate Programs
Michael F. Ringenburg, Adrian Sampson, Isaac Ackerman, Luís Ceze, Dan Grossman · 2015
Energy efficiency is a key concern in the design of modern computer systems. One promising approach to energy-efficient computation, approximate computing, trades off output accuracy for significant gains in energy efficiency. However, debugging the actual cause of output quality problems in approximate programs is challenging. This paper presents dynamic techniques to debug and monitor the quality of approximate computations. We propose both offline debugging tools that instrument code to determine the key sources of output degradation and online approaches that monitor the quality of deployed applications.