Manually optimizing the tradeoffs between accuracy, performance and energy for resource-intensive applications with flexible accuracy or precision requirements is extremely difficult. We present ApproxTuner, an automatic framework for accuracy-aware optimization of tensor-based applications while requiring only high-level end-to-end quality specifications. ApproxTuner implements and manages approximations in algorithms, system software, and hardware.

As data sizes continue to grow at an unprecedented rate, machine learning training is being forced to adopt asynchronous algorithms to maintain performance and scalability. In asynchronous training, many threads share and update the model in a racy fashion to avoid costly inter-thread synchronization.