000197474 001__ 197474 000197474 005__ 20180913062412.0 000197474 0247_ $$2doi$$a10.1098/rsta.2013.0276 000197474 02470 $$2ISI$$a000336972400001 000197474 037__ $$aARTICLE 000197474 245__ $$aOn the use of inexact, pruned hardware in atmospheric modelling 000197474 269__ $$a2014 000197474 260__ $$aLondon$$bRoyal Soc$$c2014 000197474 300__ $$a16 000197474 336__ $$aJournal Articles 000197474 520__ $$aInexact hardware design, which advocates trading the accuracy of computations in exchange for significant savings in area, power and/or performance of computing hardware, has received increasing prominence in several error-tolerant application domains, particularly those involving perceptual or statistical end-users. In this paper, we evaluate inexact hardware for its applicability in weather and climate modelling. We expand previous studies on inexact techniques, in particular probabilistic pruning, to floating point arithmetic units and derive several simulated setups of pruned hardware with reasonable levels of error for applications in atmospheric modelling. The setup is tested on the Lorenz ‘96 model, a toy model for atmospheric dynamics, using software emulation for the proposed hardware. The results show that large parts of the computation tolerate the use of pruned hardware blocks without major changes in the quality of short- and long-time diagnostics, such as forecast errors and probability density functions. This could open the door to significant savings in computational cost and to higher resolution simulations with weather and climate models. 000197474 6531_ $$aenergy efficient computing 000197474 6531_ $$aLorenz 96 000197474 6531_ $$ainexact hardware design 000197474 6531_ $$ascale separation 000197474 700__ $$aDüben, Peter D. 000197474 700__ $$aJoven, Jaime 000197474 700__ $$aLingamneni, Avinash 000197474 700__ $$aMcNamara, Hugh 000197474 700__ $$0240269$$aDe Micheli, Giovanni$$g167918 000197474 700__ $$aPalem, Krishna V. 000197474 700__ $$aPalmer, Tim 000197474 773__ $$j372$$k2018$$tProceedings of the Royal Society of London A 000197474 8564_ $$uhttp://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/$$zURL 000197474 8564_ $$s679651$$uhttps://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/197474/files/RSTA20130276.pdf$$yn/a$$zn/a 000197474 909C0 $$0252283$$pLSI1$$xU11140 000197474 909CO $$ooai:infoscience.tind.io:197474$$pSTI$$pIC$$particle 000197474 917Z8 $$x112915 000197474 917Z8 $$x112915 000197474 937__ $$aEPFL-ARTICLE-197474 000197474 973__ $$aEPFL$$rREVIEWED$$sPUBLISHED 000197474 980__ $$aARTICLE