The Effectiveness of Low-Precision Floating Arithmetic on Numerical Codes: A Case Study on Power Consumption

The low-precision floating point arithmetic that performs computation by reducing numerical accuracy with narrow bit-width is attracting since it can improve the performance of the numerical programs. Small memory footprint, faster computing speed, and energy saving are expected by performing calculation with low precision data. However, there have not been many studies on how low-precision arithmetics affects power and energy consumption of numerical codes. In this study, we investigate the power efficiency improvement by aggressively using low-precision arithmetics for HPC applications. In our evaluations, we analyze power characteristics of the Poisson's equation and the ground motion simulation programs with double precision and single precision floating point arithmetics. We confirm that energy efficiency improves by using low-precision arithmetics but it is heavily influenced by parameters such as data division and the number of OpenMP threads.