Modern computer hardware supports an increasingly wide range of
arithmetics, notably low precision floating-point ones. Lower precisions
provide significant storage, communication, speed, and energy benefits
that make them very attractive for high performance computing. However,
they also provide a correspondingly lower accuracy. This motivates the
development of mixed precision algorithms, which combine multiple
precisions to achieve both high performance and high accuracy. In this
talk, I will present two emerging trends in the design of mixed
precision algorithms that have significant potential: modularity and
adaptivity. Modularity allows for easily deriving stable mixed precision
variants of an algorithm and for combining them with other types of
approximations. Adaptivity allows for dynamically taking advantage of
application-specific opportunities by switching the least sensitive
parts of the data to low precision.