Theo Mary

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.