SFU-driven transparent approximation acceleration on GPUs

Approximate computing, the technique that sacrifices certain amount of accuracy in exchange for substantial performance boost or power reduction, is one of the most promising solutions to enable power control and performance scaling towards exascale. Although most existing approximation designs target the emerging data-intensive applications that are comparatively more error-tolerable, there is still high demand for the acceleration of traditional scientific applications (e.g., weather and nuclear simulation), which often comprise intensive transcendental function calls and are very sensitive to accuracy loss. To address this challenge, we focus on a very important but long ignored approximation unit on today's commercial GPU