{"id":14093,"date":"2018-02-02T22:14:52","date_gmt":"2018-02-03T04:14:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=14093"},"modified":"2018-02-02T22:14:52","modified_gmt":"2018-02-03T04:14:52","slug":"engaging-hard-problems-ctd-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2018\/02\/02\/engaging-hard-problems-ctd-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Engaging Hard Problems, Ctd"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Trying to predict this … Image Credit: NASA<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

I happened to run across something relating to this long-dormant thread<\/a> concerning approximate solution computing where the problems are so difficult that they consume significant amounts of energy (the latter attribute of which also applies to Bitcoin<\/strong><\/em>, as discussed here<\/a>), and as it’s from my alma mater<\/em> (not that I have any sentimental attachment to it, not being the tribal sort), the University of Minnesota<\/strong><\/em>‘s Institute of Technology<\/em><\/del> College of Science &<\/em> Engineering, I thought I’d mention it. It turns out that CS&E <\/em>has a Ph.D. student who has a paper getting published on the subject<\/a>. I think. They sure weren’t talking about these fascinating subjects back when I was in school – but then, I barely survived college anyways. From a newsletter from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Hassan [Najafi] is a doctoral student working under the guidance of Prof. David Lilja and his research interests include stochastic and approximate computing, fault-tolerant system design, and computer architecture. He is also the recipient of the University\u2019s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship<\/a> that recognizes outstanding research work, for the 2017-2018 academic year.<\/p>\n

A brief description of the paper:<\/i><\/p>\n

Recent work on stochastic computing (SC) has shown that computation using stochastic logic can be performed deterministically and accurately by properly structuring unary-style bit-streams. The hardware cost and the latency of operations are much lower than those of the conventional random SC when completely accurate results are expected. For applications where slight inaccuracy is acceptable, however, these unary stream-based deterministic approaches must run for a relatively long time to produce acceptable results. This long processing time makes the deterministic approach energy-inefficient. While randomness was a source of inaccuracy in the conventional random stream-based SC, the authors exploited pseudo-randomness in improving the progressive precision property of the deterministic approach to SC. Completely accurate results are still produced if running the operation for the required number of cycles. When slight inaccuracy is acceptable, however, significant improvement in the processing time and energy consumption is observed compared to the prior unary stream-based deterministic approach and also the conventional random-stream based approach.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It sounds fascinating, but I doubt I’d understand the paper. For example, I have no idea what might be a unary-style bit-stream<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I happened to run across something relating to this long-dormant thread concerning approximate solution computing where the problems are so difficult that they consume significant amounts of energy (the latter attribute of which also applies to Bitcoin, as discussed here), and as it’s from my alma mater (not that I \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14093"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14094,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14093\/revisions\/14094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}