On the use of inexact, pruned hardware in atmospheric modelling.
Inexact hardware design, which advocates trading the accuracy of computations in exchange for significant savings in area, power and/or performance of computing hardware, has received increasing prominence in several error-tolerant application domains, particularly those involving perceptual or statistical end-users. In this paper, we evaluate inexact hardware for its applicability in weather and climate modelling. We expand previous studies on inexact techniques, in particular probabilistic pruning, to floating point arithmetic units and derive several simulated set-ups of pruned hardware with reasonable levels of error for applications in atmospheric modelling. The set-up is tested on the Lorenz '96 model, a toy model for atmospheric dynamics, using software emulation for the proposed hardware. The results show that large parts of the computation tolerate the use of pruned hardware blocks without major changes in the quality of short- and long-time diagnostics, such as forecast errors and probability density functions. This could open the door to significant savings in computational cost and to higher resolution simulations with weather and climate models.
Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PU, UK dueben@atm.ox.ac.uk.
Peter D
PD
Düben
Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Jaume
J
Joven
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Rice University, 6100 Main Street, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
Avinash
A
Lingamneni
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Andrew Wiles Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG, UK.
Hugh
H
McNamara
Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Giovanni
G
De Micheli
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Rice University, 6100 Main Street, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
Krishna V
KV
Palem
Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PU, UK.
T N
TN
Palmer
Lorenz ’96; energy efficient computing; inexact hardware design; scale separation