SNF International Exploratory Workshop on
Theory and Practice for Error-Efficient Computing Systems


Hotel Préalpina, 1071 Chexbres, Switzerland

1st April 2017 – 4th April 2017

Organizers: Phillip Stanley-Marbell (University of Cambridge), Adrian Sampson (Cornell), and Babak Falsafi (EPFL).


The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers from multiple areas of expertise with an interest in developing hardware, software, and theory for trading or exploiting errors of various kinds for improved efficiency in computing systems. The workshop will explore both theory and hardware proposals for such platforms. The workshop will provide an opportunity to explore what it takes to demonstrate ideas in real systems, while fostering common terminology, software tools, and hardware evaluation and measurement tools.

Themes

To achieve the aims of the workshop, we have structured the workshop activities around five themes: Theme 1: Techniques that can be demonstrated today; Theme 2: Techniques that should be demonstrable today, but require hardware or software engineering effort; Theme 3: Techniques that require fundamentally new theoretical results and hardware technologies; Theme 4: Complete platform studies; Theme 5: Fundamental upper bounds on potential benefit of error-efficiency.

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Outcomes

We expect the workshop to have impact in four ways: Impact 1: Common terminology for work on theory; Impact 2: Design objectives and guidelines for common hardware evaluation techniques; Impact 3: Identification of grand challenges across the hardware, software, and application stack for error-efficient computing systems; Impact 4: Target research problems identified by participants in each workshop theme.


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Hardware

The workshop will use a set of hardware kits as a initial common baseline for hands-on discussions during the workshop. Each kit consists of: Hardware kit item 1: One ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller evaluation board; Hardware kit item 2: one Lattice iCE40 FPGA evaluation board; Hardware kit item 3: One 96x64 pixel OLED display; Hardware kit item 4: One current measurement board; Other hardware kit items: USB cable, one mini breadboard, breadboard wires.

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Workshop Program


Saturday, 1st April 2017

Time Agenda Room
08:30 – 09:30 Welcome, workshop introduction, and participant introductions (lightning talks) Salle Symphonie
09:30 – 10:30 Tutorial 1
Computation, Errors, and Efficiency: Terminology, History, and Bridges
Phillip Stanley-Marbell, University of Cambridge, UK
Salle Symphonie
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee Break Salle Symphonie
11:00 – 12:30 Parallel working sessions for themes 1 – 5 Theme 1 and 2: Parchet
Theme 3 and 5: Lavaux A
Theme 4: Lavaux B
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 15:30 Open Workshop Discussion
Complete Platform Studies: Do We Need an End-to-End Demonstrator?
Salle Symphonie
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break Salle Symphonie
16:00 – 17:30 Tutorial 2
Evolution of Stochastic Computing
Armin Alaghi, University of Washington, USA
Salle Symphonie
17:30 – 18:30 Theme discussion updates on themes 1 - 5 (status and goals) Salle Symphonie
18:30 – Dinner



Sunday, 2nd April 2017

Time Agenda Room
09:00 – 10:30 Tutorial 3
Examining hardware-level knobs and their leverage for approximate computing
Naveen Verma, Princeton University, USA
Salle Symphonie
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee Break Salle Symphonie
11:00 – 12:30 Parallel working sessions for themes 1 – 5 Theme 1 and 2: Parchet
Theme 3 and 5: Lavaux A
Theme 4: Lavaux B
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 15:30 Tutorial 4
(Topic: Type Systems and Programming Languages for Approximate Computing)
Sasa Misailovic, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA
Michael Carbin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Salle Symphonie
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break Salle Symphonie
16:00 – 17:30 Tutorial 5
Hardware-level Challenges for Approximate Computing
Andreas Gerstlauer, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Salle Symphonie
17:30 – 18:30 Theme discussion updates on Themes 1 - 5 (status and updated goals) Salle Symphonie
18:30 – Dinner



Monday, 3rd April 2017

Time Agenda Room
09:00 – 10:30 Tutorial 6
Modern Coding Theory for Error-Efficient Computing
Lara Dolecek, University of California at Los Angeles, USA
Salle Symphonie
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee Break Salle Symphonie
11:00 – 12:30 Parallel working sessions for themes 1 – 5 Theme 1 and 2: Parchet
Theme 3 and 5: Lavaux A
Theme 4: Lavaux B
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 15:30 Open Workshop Discussion: Roadblocks from Theory to Practice Salle Symphonie
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break Salle Symphonie
16:00 – 17:30 Tutorial 7
ACCEPT, an Open-Source Research Infrastructure for Approximate Computing
Adrian Sampson, Cornell University, USA
Salle Symphonie
17:30 – 18:30 Theme discussion updates on Themes 1 - 5 (preliminary reports) Salle Symphonie
19:00 – 19:30 Meeting in front of the hotel for taxi transfer to restaurant for dinner Front of hotel



Tuesday, 4th April 2017

Time Agenda Room
09:00 – 10:30 Tutorial 8
Displays, Perception, and Approximation
Phillip Stanley-Marbell, University of Cambridge, UK
Salle Symphonie
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee Break Salle Symphonie
11:00 – 12:30 Parallel working sessions for themes 1 – 5 Theme 1 and 2: Parchet
Theme 3 and 5: Lavaux A
Theme 4: Lavaux B
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 15:30 Presentations on workshop themes 1 and 2 Salle Symphonie
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break Salle Symphonie
16:00 – 18:30 Presentations on worksop themes 3, 4 and 5 Salle Symphonie
18:30 – 19:00 Summary of workshop insights and closing remarks Salle Symphonie





Participants

Sara Achour MIT
Armin Alaghi University of Washington
Mattia Cacciotti EPFL
Michael Carbin MIT
Alex Daglis EPFL
Eva Darulova MPI-SWS
Lara Dolecek UCLA
Mario Drumond EPFL
Natalie Enright Jerger University of Toronto
Babak Falsafi EPFL
Andreas Gerstlauer The University of Texas at Austin
Ghayoor Gillani University of Twente
Djordje Jevdjic University of Washington
Sasa Misailovic UIUC
Thierry Moreau University of Washington
Adrian Sampson Cornell University
Phillip Stanley-Marbell University of Cambridge
Radha Venkatagiri UIUC
Naveen Verma Princeton University
Marina Zapater EPFL
Damien Zufferey MPI-SWS





Location

The train ride from Geneva airport to Chexbres takes a little bit more than 1 hour.
The train timetable is available here.
The closest train station to the hotel is "Chexbres-Village" and is within 10 minutes walking distance.





Workshop Sponsors