A programming language for precision--cost tradeoffs

Many computational systems need to deal with various forms of imprecision and uncertainty in their data; it is also the case that many systems, especially mobile and distributed systems, must be able to trade off the precision of their data and operations against the cost of performing those operations. Unfortunately, for many applications, trying to make these tradeoffs severely complicates the program, because there does not yet exist a programming model that gives the programmer the ability to easily describe the relevant tradeoffs between precision and cost of operations or to express in an algorithm what tradeoffs are appropriate under what circumstances. This paper lays a solid foundation for exploring such programming models by introducing and analyzing a simple core abstraction on which others can be based. We determine what sorts of strategies are and are not possible within this abstraction, and discuss what specific difficulties must be overcome in future work in order to extend the abstraction to encompass a larger class of programs.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Steele, Matthew D., M. Eng. (Matthew David). Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Saman Amarasinghe.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/53149

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/53149