Will Approximation Drive Post-Moore’s Law HPC Gains?

“Hardware-based improvements are going to get more and more difficult,” said Neil Thompson, an innovation scholar at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). “I think that’s something that this crowd will probably, actually, be already familiar with.” Thompson, speaking at Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2021, likely wasn’t wrong: the proximate death of Moore’s law has been a hot topic in the HPC community for a long time. But Thompson wasn’t just there to sound the death knell – he was there to discuss the future of computing, which, in his terms, was an approximate one.