Harnessing error-prone chips
As transistors get smaller, they also grow less reliable. Increasing their operating voltage can help, but that means a corresponding increase in power consumption. With information technology consuming a steadily growing fraction of the world’s energy supplies, some researchers and hardware manufacturers are exploring the possibility of simply letting chips botch the occasional computation. In many popular applications — video rendering, for instance — users probably wouldn’t notice the difference, and it could significantly improve energy efficiency. At this year’s Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) conference, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory presented a new system that lets programmers identify sections of their code that can tolerate a little error. The system then determines which program instructions to assign to unreliable hardware components, to maximize energy savings while still meeting the programmers’ accuracy requirements. The system, dubbed Chisel, also features a tool that helps programmers evaluate precisely how...