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arXiv · 2105.07432

Zero Aware Configurable Data Encoding by Skipping Transfer for Error Resilient Applications

Chandan Kumar Jha·Shreyas Singh·Riddhi Thakker·Manu Awasthi·Joycee Mekie
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Abstract

In this paper, we propose Zero Aware Configurable Data Encoding by Skipping Transfer (ZAC-DEST), a data encoding scheme to reduce the energy consumption of DRAM channels, specifically targeted towards approximate computing and error resilient applications. ZAC-DEST exploits the similarity between recent data transfers across channels and information about the error resilience behavior of applications to reduce on-die termination and switching energy by reducing the number of 1's transmitted over the channels. ZAC-DEST also provides a number of knobs for trading off the application's accuracy for energy savings, and vice versa, and can be applied to both training and inference. We apply ZAC-DEST to five machine learning applications. On average, across all applications and configurations, we observed a reduction of $40$% in termination energy and $37$% in switching energy as compared to the state of the art data encoding technique BD-Coder with an average output quality loss of $10$%. We show that if both training and testing are done assuming the presence of ZAC-DEST, the output quality of the applications can be improved upto 9 times as compared to when ZAC-DEST is only applied during testing leading to energy savings during training and inference with increased output quality.

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Chandan Kumar Jha, Shreyas Singh, Riddhi Thakker, Manu Awasthi, Joycee Mekie. 2021-05-16. Zero Aware Configurable Data Encoding by Skipping Transfer for Error Resilient Applications. https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.07432

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