Inria International program
Associate Team: IoTA
Ultra-Low Power Computing Platform for IoT leveraging Controlled Approximation
Principal investigator (Inria): Olivier Sentieys, CAIRN
Principal investigator (EPFL): Christian Enz, EPFL
Energy issues are central to the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), and more generally to the ICT industry. Current low-power design techniques cannot support the estimated growth in number of IoT objects and at the same time keep the energy consumption within sustainable bounds, both on the IoT node side and on cloud/edge-cloud side. This project aims to build on the preliminary results on inexact and exact sub/near-threshold circuit design to achieve major energy consumption reductions by enabling adaptive accuracy control of applications.
Advanced ultra low-power hardware design methods utilize very low supply voltage, such as in near-threshold and sub-threshold designs. These emerging technologies are very promising avenues to decrease active and stand-by-power in electronic devices. To move another step forward, recently, approximate computing has become a major field of research in the past few years.
IoTA proposes to address, in a consistent fashion, the entire design stack, from hardware design, up to software application analysis, compiler optimizations, and dynamic energy management. We do believe that combining sub-near-threshold with inexact circuits on the hardware side and, in addition, extending this with intelligent and adaptive power management on the software side will produce outstanding results in terms of energy reduction, i.e., at least one order of magnitude, in IoT.
The main scientific challenge is twofold: (1) to add adaptive accuracy to hardware blocks built in near/sub threshold technology and (2) to provide the tools and methods to program and make efficient use of these hardware blocks for applications in the IoT domain.
This entails developing approximate computing units, on one side, and methods and tools, on the other side, to rigorously explore trade-offs between accuracy and energy consumption in IoT systems.
The expertise of the members of the two teams is complementary and covers all required technical knowledge necessary to reach our objectives, i.e., ultra low power hardware design (EPFL), approximate operators and functions (INRIA, EPFL), formal analysis of precision in algorithms (INRIA), and static and dynamic energy management (INRIA, EPFL).
Finally, the proof of concept will consist of results on (1) an adaptive, inexact or exact, ultra-low power microprocessor in 28 nm process and (2) a real prototype implemented in an FPGA platform combining processors and hardware accelerators. Several software use-cases relevant for the IoT domain will be considered, e.g., embedded vision, IoT sensors data fusion, to practically demonstrate the benefits of our approach.
Scientific objectives
The overarching goal of this project is to harness the latent energy-efficiency potential of approximate and inexact computing in energy-constraint domains by means of adaptive accuracy control of applications. To build up towards our ambitious goal, we defined three major objectives for the first year, as follows:
- Inexact arithmetic units and accelerators
- Living with timing errors as a source of approximation
- Approximation error modeling
