Loop perforation is an

approximate computing Approximate computing is an emerging paradigm for energy-efficient and/or high-performance design. It includes a plethora of computation techniques that return a possibly inaccurate result rather than a guaranteed accurate result, and that can be u ...

technique that allows to regularly skip some iterations of a loop.Steilos Sidiroglou, Sasa Misailovic, Henry Hoffmann, and Martin Rinard
"Managing Performance vs. Accuracy Trade-offs With Loop Perforation."
ESEC/FSE. September, 2011 It relies on one

parameter A parameter (), generally, is any characteristic that can help in defining or classifying a particular system (meaning an event, project, object, situation, etc.). That is, a parameter is an element of a system that is useful, or critical, when ...

: the ''perforation rate''. The perforation rate can be interpreted as the number of iteration to skip each time or the number of iterations to perform before skipping one. Variants of loop perforation include those that skip iterations deterministically at regular intervals, those that skip iterations at the beginning or the end of the loop, and those that skip a random sample of iterations. The compiler may select the perforation variant at the compile-time, or include instrumentation that allows the runtime system to adaptively adjust the perforation strategy and perforation rate to satisfy the end-to-end accuracy goal.

Code examples

The examples that follows provide the result of loop perforation applied on this C-like source code for (int i = 0; i < N; i++)

Skip ''n'' iterations each time

for (int i = 0; i < N; i++)

Skip one iteration after ''n''

int count = 0; for (int i = 0; i < N; i++)

Code examples

Skip ''n'' iterations each time

Skip one iteration after ''n''

See also