TAFFO: The compiler-based precision tuner

Cattaneo, Daniele; Chiari, Michele; Agosta, Giovanni; Cherubin, Stefano

Abstract

We present taffo, a framework that automatically performs precision tuning to exploit the performance/accuracy trade-off. In order to avoid expensive dynamic analyses, taffo leverages programmer annotations which encapsulate domain knowledge about the conditions under which the software being optimized will run. As a result, taffo is easy to use and provides state-of-the-art optimization efficacy in a variety of hardware configurations and application domains. We provide guidelines for the effective exploitation of taffo by showing a typical example of usage on a simple application, achieving a speedup up to 60% at the price of an absolute error of 3.53×10−5. taffo is modular and based on the solid llvm technology, which allows extensibility to improved analysis techniques, and comprehensive support for the most common precision-reduced data types and programming languages. As a result, the taffo technology has been selected as the precision tuning tool of the European Training Network on Approximate Computing.

Citation

Cattaneo, D., Chiari, M., Agosta, G., & Cherubin, S. (2022). TAFFO: The compiler-based precision tuner. SoftwareX, 20, Article 101238. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2022.101238

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 15, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Nov 3, 2022
• Publication Date: 2022-12
• Deposit Date: Nov 3, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 3, 2022
• Journal: SoftwareX
• Print ISSN: 2352-7110
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 20
• Article Number: 101238
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2022.101238
• Keywords: Mixed precision, Compiler, Approximate computing
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2948016
• Publisher URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235271102200156X