Read a blog-post version of this openXchange live talk here on Medium!

How can we sacrifice correctness, reliability, and precision of an algorithm to increase its efficiency, while still producing useful results? Approximate computing takes a different view of the role and effect of approximations in computations. Instead of considering approximations as a necessary evil of digital computers, one tries to allow application-specific admissible approximations in order to reap significant improvements in energy efficiency. A cross-layer view of applications, numerical methods and computer architecture opens up new perspectives and research questions.

Christian Plessl is professor (W3) for High-Performance Computing at the department of Computer Science at Paderborn University. He is also managing director of the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC²), which is a central scientific institute of Paderborn University and a National High-Performance Computing center in the NHR alliance. In the last years, he has been dealing with different aspects and application fields of Approximate Computing.