High Performance Approximate Computing by Adaptive Relaxed Synchronization

Bashima Islam, Faysal Hossain Shezan, Rifat Shahriyar

Abstract: Approximate computing has the potential to provide approximate results with user defined error bound faster than conventional computing. Relaxed synchronization is one of the many ways to achieve approximate computation. Researchers in this area primarily focus on programming languages like C/C++, but languages like Java are still largely overlooked. In Java, generally full synchronization can be achieved by using synchronized keyword for method and block level or by using various locks of Java concurrency utilities framework. We provide a detailed performance evaluation of these different mechanisms to achieve full synchronization in Java. We introduce an adaptive locking mechanism using existing locks of Java concurrency utilities framework to provide relaxed synchronization for Java to be used for approximate computing. Our novel relaxed synchronization based framework achieved one of the important outcomes of approximate computing, better performance.