STI Seminar IN PERSON: Wednesday, 23 November 2022 at 9:00 a.m.

[STI Secretariat]

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STI seminar
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You are most cordially invited to an in-person seminar organizedby the 
ICTP Science Technology and Innovation Unit (STI Unit)

** * * Wednesday, 23 November 2022 at 9:00 a.m. *** * *

*Venue: *Adriatico Guesthouse, Kastler Lecture Hall***

Speaker: *Florent Dupont de Dinechin, *National Institute of Applied 
Sciences (INSA), Lyon, France

Title:***"The FloPoCo project: FPGAs computing just right thanks to 
application-specific arithmetic. *

_Abstract_

If an application does not compute accurately enough, somebody 
willcomplain. Conversely, as soon as an application computes 
accuratelyenough, chances are that it computes too accurately. Nobody 
willcomplain, but maybe they should? Computing too accurately is a waste 
ofresources and power.

This talk is about computing just right: computing accurately enough,but 
not too accurately. More generally, it is about the opportunity, 
onFPGAs, to design the arithmetic operators for the application, 
insteadof the other way around: in traditional programming we have to 
designthe application around the few arithmetic operators offered by 
amicroprocessor.

There is a qualitative aspect to application-specific arithmetic: 
thistalk will review a few simple recipes that expose an infinity of 
usefulapplication-specific arithmetic operators. Then there is a 
quantitativeaspect, and we are back to "Computing just right": what 
accuracy isneeded at each point of the computation? Answering this 
question leadsto surprisingly difficult problems, for instance 
understanding what thecode you just wrote was supposed to compute.


/Please note that the seminar will only take place in presence/