The NiPS Summer School on “Energy Aware Transprecision Computing” is a 4-days school experience devoted to the foundation of a novel approach to computing: the transprecision computing. The nature-inspired driving principle behind this new approach is that almost any application involves a large amount of intermediate calculations, whose accuracy is irrelevant to the final user, who is interested only in the reliability and validity of the final result. The main reason why in today’s systems these intermediate steps are still performed in full-precision is that existing hardware, runtime software, programming environments and algorithmic approaches do not offer well-assessed solutions to relax accuracy in a controllable way without sacrificing reliability. Lifting this limitation allows a slew of opportunities to arise, which will reduce time- and energy-to-solution by orders of magnitude, without compromising the accuracy and reliability of the final result.

This Summer School has a broad scope ranging from physical and mathematical foundation to low level technological aspects, to advanced compilation techniques. We will deal with transprecision computing, discussing its potential applications in a wide range of practical cases: from the tiny nodes of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), to the large computing centers of High Performance Computing (HPC).

• Fundamentals on energy (Luca Gammaitoni)
• Physics of Information (Luca Gammaitoni/Igor Neri)

• Transprecision algorithms as a disruptive technology for challenging the Exascale energy barrier (Andrew Emerson)
• Adaptive-precision algorithms for sparse linear systems (Enrique Quintana/Andres Tomas)

• Advanced compilation techniques (Andrea Marongiu)
• Transprecision Floating-Point Library (Giuseppe Tagliavini)

• Integrating reduced precision concepts into applications and real code (Florian Scheidegger)
• Integrating reduced precision concepts into applications and real code (Mahwish/JunKyu Lee)

• RISC-V ISA/ Microarchitecture (Frank K. Gürkaynak)
• Parallel Ultra Low-Power Processing ,PULP, systems (Davide Rossi)
• FPGA programming using arbitrary precision data-types (Dionysios Diamantopoulos)
• Approximate DRAM and memory controllers (Norbert Wehn)

• GAPUINO board/Mr. Wolf based board (Francesco Paci)
• PULP (Fabian Schuiki)

July 16th

• 18:00: Welcome cocktail

July 17th – July 20th

• 9:00 – 18:00: Lectures

July 18th

• 9:00 – 12:00: Lectures
• 14:30: it is foreseen a touristic guided excursion through the Trasimeno lake and, following, the social dinner in a special location.

July 19th – July 20th

• 9:00 – 18:00: Lectures

Accompanying persons are welcome to the summer school. Touristic attractions and cultural events, including the world renown Jazz festival “Umbria Jazz” that will be running in Perugia during the summer school days.