50.
Best-effort Computing: Re-thinking Parallel
Software and Hardware
Srimat T. Chakradhar and Anand Raghunathan
Systems Architecture Department, NEC Laboratories America
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University
chak@nec-labs.com,raghunathan@purdue.edu
ABSTRACT
With the advent of mainstream parallel computing, applica-
tions can obtain better performance only by scaling to plat-
forms with larger numbers of cores. This is widely considered
to be a very challenging problem due to the diculty of paral-
lel programming and the bottlenecks to ecient parallel exe-
cution. Inspired by how networking and storage systems have
scaled to handle very large volumes of packet trac and per-
sistent data, we propose a new approach to the design of scal-
able, parallel computing platforms. For decades, computing
platforms have gone to great lengths to ensure that every com-
putation specied by applications is faithfully executed. While
this design philosophy has remained largely unchanged, appli-
cations and the basic characteristics of their workloads have
changed considerably. A wide range of existing and emerging
computing workloads have an inherent forgiving nature. We
therefore argue that adopting a best-eort service model for
various software and hardware components of the computing
platform stack can lead to drastic improvements in scalabil-
ity. Applications are cognizant of the best-eort model, and
separate their computations into those that may be executed
on a best-eort basis and those that require the traditional
execution guarantees. Best-eort computations may be ex-
ploited to simply reduce the computing workload, shape it to
be more suitable for parallel execution, or execute it on un-
reliable hardware components. Guaranteed computations are
realized either through an overlay software layer on top of the
best-eort substrate, or through the use of application-specic
strategies. We describe a system architecture for a best-eort
computing platform, provide examples of parallel software and
hardware that embody the best-eort model, and show that
large improvements in performance and energy eciency are
possible through the adoption of this approach.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.0 [Computer Systems Organization]: General
General Terms
Algorithms, Design, Performance, Reliability
Keywords
Best eort systems, parallel computing, multi core, perfor-
mance, scalability
1. INTRODUCTION
Improvements in semiconductor devices have fueled im-
provements in the performance of computing systems for sev-
 ing workloads that makes them good candidates for best-eort
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 865
eral decades. However, as we approach the limits of scaling,
several limitations and challenges introduced by scaling have
changed the nature of the game signicantly. First, the inabil-
ity to continue classical scaling (due to rapidly increasing leak-
age) led to the end of frequency scaling as the means to perfor-
mance improvements. Consequently, parallelism has emerged
as the primary avenue to improved performance. However,
achieving consistent performance improvements in this new
regime is quite challenging due to the diculty of parallel pro-
gramming, and the bottlenecks to ecient parallel execution.
As devices scale (possibly into the post-CMOS era), further
challenges are expected, such as increasing device unreliability
due to defects, soft errors, and extreme process variations.
In light of the above challenges, it is important to consider
new approaches to design computing platforms. These new
approaches can help sustain the performance scaling that ap-
plications are used to seeing, by (i) complementing the current
scaling approach of just increasing the number of cores, (ii)
addressing the bottlenecks to parallel execution so that appli-
cations can take advantage of computing platforms with larger
numbers of cores, and (iii) allowing computing platforms to be
built from unreliable components (but without incurring high
overheads for fault tolerance).
In this paper, we argue for re-thinking the design of the
entire computing platform stack - from applications to hard-
ware - using an approach that we call best-eort computing.
Put simply, the idea is to design most if not all components
of the stack to provide services using a best-eort model, re-
alizing drastic improvements in eciency and scalability. Ap-
plications (or programming models that they use) are struc-
tured appropriately to take advantage of a best-eort comput-
ing platform, by exposing computations that can be executed
on a best-eort basis. Computations that are not suitable
for best-eort execution can be handled by (i) separate hard-
ware and software that provide the traditional guaranteed
model of computation, (ii) a software overlay layer within the
platform that ensures their correct and complete execution
on the best-eort substrate, or (iii) by implementing faster,
application-specic strategies to compensate for the imperfec-
tions in the computing platform. We argue for a best-eort
computing model by drawing analogies from networking and
storage systems, and by examining how a best-eort approach
has enabled them to scale dramatically. We provide concrete
examples of how to design parallel software and hardware us-
ing the best-eort computing model and present evidence of
improvements in performance and energy eciency.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 out-
lines the rationale for pursuing a best-eort model for com-
puting systems. Section 3 discusses the best eort comput-
ing model and Section 4 identies characteristics of comput-
computing. Section 5 provides various examples of designing
best-eort parallel software and hardware. Section 6 summa-
rizes our proposal and discusses some possible ramications.
2. RATIONALE
Scalability is a desirable property of a wide range of mod-
ern information systems, including networking, storage, and
computing systems. It indicates the ability of the system to
handle growing amount of work in a graceful manner. It can

Applications
Networking
Computing
Best-effort Best-effort
Storage
packet query
delivery processing,
(Internet ? Relaxed
Protocol) consistency
Figure 1: Best-eort model in networking and storage
systems
also refer to the capability of a system to increase the total
throughput (as load increases) in direct proportion to the ad-
dition of more resources (in the context of parallel computing
systems, more processors). There are two broad methods of
adding more computing resources to a system. Scale-up adds
more resources to a single node in a system, typically involving
addition of processors or memory to a single computer. Scale-
out adds more nodes to a system, such as adding a new com-
puter to a cluster or distributed system. In the context of high
performance computing, there are two other notions of scala-
bility. Strong scaling refers to how solution time varies with
number of processors for a xed total problem size. Weak scal-
ing refers to how solution time varies when we x the problem
size per processor, and add more processors. Unfortunately,
adding more resources to a system does not necessarily trans-
late to improved performance. Irrespective of the road taken
to achieve scalability, or the metrics used to measure scalabil-
ity, a fundamental challenge in designing computing systems
is to translate increased resources into improved application
performance. We pose the question: Is there a simple system
design principle that has served us well over the past several
decades to build scalable systems? While the focus of this paper
is on computing systems, we answer the question by examin-
ing how scaling challenges have been addressed in networking
and storage systems.
As shown in Figure 1, applications rely on functions pro-
vided by the networking, storage and compute sub-systems.
Scalability of an application is intimately related to the scal-
ability of each of these sub-systems. We briey examine the
scalability of networking and storage sub-systems to identify
a common design principle for system scalability.
Networking: The Internet Protocol (IP), on which the In-
ternet is built, was developed three decades ago with system
scaling as a rst order priority. Towards that end, an impor-
tant design decision was to make the end hosts responsible for
reliability rather than the core network. Excessive workload
in the network is dealt with in a simple manner, by allowing
switches and routers in the network to drop packets. The IP
protocol has been successful in managing ever-increasing vol-
umes of end points and packet trac for over three decades
(exponential growth with packet trac doubling every two
years). While this could be attributed to a combination of
factors, one of the key design decisions to enable scalability
was simply reserving the right to drop packets. By sacric-
ing guarantees, it has become possible to build simpler, faster
and scalable networks. When the IP protocol was developed,
there were very few applications that could directly use the
best-eort packet delivery service, and most applications used
TCP to guarantee packet delivery. However, over the years,
numerous new scenarios have emerged where applications pre-
fer to routinely use the higher-performance, best-eort packet
delivery protocols. For example, the UDP protocol is built on
top of the IP protocol, and it does not guarantee reliability
or correct sequencing of packets. Applications that use UDP
handle reliability requirements, if any, on their own. DNS is
the perfect description of this use case. The costs of connection
set-up for reliable communication are too high, and DNS im-
plements its own protocol for reliability or re-sends. Another
scenario is when delivering data that can be lost (without ad-
versely aecting the application) because new data is being
generated that will replace the lost data. Weather data, video
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50.2
streaming, VOIP, Skype, stock quotation services and gaming
applications are good examples of such a use case. Speed is
of utmost importance and it does not matter if some updates
are missed. It is indeed remarkable that a simple best-eort
packet delivery service like IP has supported everything from
le transfers, e-mail, and web trac to streaming media, voice
communications, social networking and collaborative comput-
ing [1].
Storage: Every popular website built on top of a tradi-
tional relational database experiences problems with scaling
the storage back end [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. The most impor-
tant consideration for a data storage system is its ability to
rapidly scale to handle more users. Here, scaling refers to
the capability of the system to service more users while keep-
ing the cost per user constant. Due to the interactive nature
of users queries, the response time for any given query must
be independent of the number of users in the system. Data
scale independence allows the user base to grow by orders of
magnitude without changing the application. For example,
consider the social networking web site Facebook, which has
several billion dynamically generated page views per day [9].
Trac of this magnitude results in over 23,000 page views a
second (and each page view could result in many queries to
the database). Facebook responded by developing their own
complex, proprietary storage system [10]. Several functions
and services that are commonly implemented in traditional
relational data stores hindered the scalability of the storage
system. Notably, their system provides only eventual or re-
laxed consistency, wherein a write to the storage system will
not be seen by all users for an unspecied, variable period of
time. For Facebook and many other popular collaborative ap-
plications like Flickr, Yelp etc., the relaxed consistency model
oers superior scalablity and performance as compared to a
traditional database that provides full atomicity, consistency,
isolation, and durability (ACID) compliance.
We see that there are really two reasons to place functional-
ity in the network or storage sub-system rather than the end
hosts or applications. Either all applications need it, or a large
number of applications benet by an increase in performance
due to the clever implementation of a complex service or func-
tion in the sub-system. Unfortunately, when new applications
like VoIP or Facebook use existing services and functions like
guaranteed delivery or consistency, their performance deteri-
orates with increased load. Also, workload characteristics of
these new applications (VoIP, Facebook etc.) are inherently
dierent. Therefore, new packet delivery and data consistency
mechanisms with radically dierent semantics and goals were
necessary to improve scalability and performance of these ap-
plications. In general, new applications will continuously force
us to re-evaluate semantics and goals of functions and services
that are included in common sub-systems.
Note that the adjective best-eort does sometimes get in-
terpreted as highly unreliable, but this is unfortunate. In
fact, in networking systems, best-eort packet delivery is re-
ferred to as a highly reliable delivery service [1, 11]. Therefore,
equating best-eort with unreliability is neither appropriate
nor factual. Reliability is not a discrete quantity with only
two values yes or no. Rather, it allows for a spectrum of possi-
bilities that range from completely reliable to outright unreli-
able. As the networking and storage applications show, mod-
est relaxations of traditional strict guarantees do not materi-
ally alter the core functionality of these applications. Rather,
such relaxations have enabled disproportionate performance
and scalability benets. Our proposal of best-eort comput-
ing platforms should also be viewed in a similar spirit.
3. BEST-EFFORT COMPUTING MODEL
Since a large number of emerging applications already tol-
erate imperfections in the network or storage systems in re-
turn for higher, scalable performance, it begs the question of
whether computing platforms have to be perfect. From a dif-
ferent perspective, can some of the functions currently being
handled by the computing platform be shifted to the appli-
cations in return for higher, more scalable computing perfor-
mance? The best-eort computing paradigm is a proposal
that oers applications an unprecedented, scalable computing
platform, by making a fundamental change in the contract be-

Applications
Best-effort Programming Model
Guaranteed
Optional
Computations
Computations
Guaranteed
Computation layer
Best-effort
Computation layer
Best-effort
Operating System
Best-effort
Parallel Hardware
Figure 2: Conceptual model of a best-eort computing
system
tween applications and the computing platform. Like network-
ing and storage systems, best-eort computing shifts some of
the traditional concerns (like guaranteed execution of tasks)
to the applications rather than the computing platform being
solely responsible for these functions. In return, the best-eort
computing paradigm promises increased scalability and higher
performance for the applications.
The basic tenet of our proposal is that the computing plat-
form provides computing as a best-eort service. For exam-
ple, (i) the computing platform may drop (i.e. not execute)
some of the computations requested by the application (every
application can be viewed as a collection of small computa-
tions), (ii) the computing platform may not honor some of
the task data dependencies or synchronization requirements
of these computations while executing them in parallel, or
(iii) the computations may be executed on unreliable hard-
ware that introduces occasional errors into the results. This
view is similar to the Internet Protocol model in computer
networking where the network is unable to guarantee delivery
of all packets, or the relaxed-consistency model in large-scale
data stores where the storage sub-system is unable to guar-
antee consistency of data. By sacricing guarantees, it has
become possible to build simpler and faster networks. By sac-
ricing consistency, it has become possible to build large data
stores with fast query response times. Similarly, by sacric-
ing guaranteed computation, it is possible to build faster and
more scalable computing systems. There are several scenar-
ios that may warrant best-eort computing service: defects in
hardware, real-time constraints on response times, excessive
computation load, or power constraints.
Figure 2 depicts a conceptual model of the overall system
architecture for a best-eort computing system. Unreliability
of the underlying computing platform forces the application to
re-structure its computations into two categories: (i) optional
computations that may be dropped by the computing platform
or executed incorrectly, and (ii) mandatory computations that
must be executed correctly in order to maintain integrity of
the application. This is again similar to re-structuring of net-
work applications today to utilize the unreliable UDP protocol
or the reliable TCP protocol, both of which are realized on the
unreliable IP protocol. New parallel programming models that
provide high-level programming templates to easily and intu-
itively express various algorithms for execution on a parallel,
unreliable computing platform will enable rapid development
of new applications. Using these programming models, ap-
plications can easily specify optional and mandatory compu-
tations. Optional computations can be leveraged in at least
three ways: (1) drop computations to reduce overall workload
and improve performance, (2) make the computations more
amenable to parallel execution by increasing parallelism, and
reducing communication and synchronization or memory ac-
cesses, or (3) execute the computations on unreliable but e-
cient hardware. The best-eort computation layer allows the
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50.2
application to easily experiment with a variety of strategies
for execution of optional computations. It implements these
best-eort strategies, and manages the execution of guaranteed
computations. Like the TCP protocol in computer networking,
the best-eort computation layer also implements a mechanism
to ensure reliable execution of a mandatory computation by re-
peated re-execution, if necessary. Many of the functions and
services provided by traditional operating systems can also be
simplied by using the best-eort service philosophy. Finally
the best-eort model can be taken down to the underlying par-
allel hardware, by trading o correct hardware operation for
increased performance or energy eciency.
4. FORGIVING NATURE OF COMPUTING
WORKLOADS
The success of a best-eort service model greatly depends
on the nature of applications that utilize it. In the context of
the Internet, the best-eort architecture has worked extremely
well for data trac, and even for real-time applications that
have some amount of adaptivity [12].
In this Section, we focus on the characteristics of applica-
tions that are well-suited to a best-eort computing platform.
At an abstract level, we pose the question - which applications
can live with a computing platform that is not guaranteed to
execute computations in a 100% correct manner? We believe
that a large class of computing workloads possess characteris-
tics, which we collectively refer to as their forgiving nature,
that enable them to execute well on best-eort computing plat-
forms. Computing workloads with a forgiving nature are all
around us, and they include digital signal processing, mul-
timedia processing (image, video, audio), network processing,
wireless communications, web search and recognition and data
mining. The forgiving nature of these applications may be at-
tributed to a variety of factors, some of which are listed below.
Noisy input data: They process input data that is
derived from the real world, and inherently noisy. Since
the applications and algorithms are designed to deal with
noisy data, they are also often able to tolerate erroneous
computations.
Large, redundant data sets: They process large input
data sets that have signicant redundancy. This enables
them to be inherently resilient to errors in computations
without degrading the result.
No perfect or golden result: They come with an im-
plicit understanding (usage model) that a perfect result
is not possible or may not be necessary . Often, there
may also be no single golden result, i.e., several dierent
outputs are equally acceptable.
Limited perceptual ability of users: Even when
there is a notion of a perfect result, many applications
produce outputs for human consumption. The limited
perceptual ability of humans to discern minor variations
in the output imply that a good enough output is often
sucient.
Statistical or probabilistic computations: Applica-
tions that employ statistical or probabilistic computa-
tions are often tolerant to imprecision or errors in some
of the computations.
Self-healing: They employ iterative computations
where the result is rened until a certain criterion is
satised; therefore, errors in the computations may be
corrected or healed by performing additional iterations
or renement of the result.
In order to quantitatively illustrate the forgiving nature of
workloads, we focus on two representative applications from
the domains of Recognition and Mining (RM), which repre-
sent an emerging class of applications that are expected to be
prevalent on future computing platforms [13, 14]. Specically,
we focus on K-means clustering and Generalized Learning Vec-
tor Quantization (GLVQ). K-means is a widely used clustering
algorithm that is based on unsupervised learning [15]. It clus-
ters a given set of points that are represented as vectors in

K-means clustering quality
with centroid perturbation
300
Clustering Quality Impact (%)
250
200
150
100
50
0
1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29
# iterations
GLVQ classification quality
with model perturbation
93
Classification Accuracy (%)
92
91
90
89
88
87
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
# epochs (iterations)
Figure 3: Illustration of the forgiving nature of K-
means clustering and GLVQ classication
a multi-dimensional space. The algorithm begins by picking
a random set of cluster centroids, and performs the following
operations to assign points to clusters in an iterative manner
until the clustering does not change any more.
1. Compute the distance between every point and every
cluster centroid
2. Assign each point to the cluster with the closest centroid.
3. Re-compute the new centroid for each cluster as the mean
of all the points in the cluster.
A common application of K-means is to segment images into
regions with similar color and texture characteristics (each
pixel represents a point in the K-means clustering algorithm).
Image segmentation is a useful pre-processing step for image
content analysis or compression. In order to evaluate the for-
giving nature of the K-means algorithm, we executed a soft-
ware implementation of K-means to perform image segmenta-
tion across several image data sets, while injecting errors in
the cluster centroid that is computed as a result of each iter-
ation 1 . Figure 3(a) shows how the quality of the clustering
computed by K-means varies with dierent rates of error injec-
tion. Each curve corresponds to a dierent error injection rate,
and a best-eort shows the improvement of clustering quality
as the algorithm iterates to convergence. The results suggest
that executing K-means on a computing platform that intro-
duces fairly large error rates (up to 1%) will have virtually no
impact on the clustering quality. However, it is important to
note that not all computations in the algorithm can be subject
to errors - for example, we note that the operations that deter-
mine whether to continue iterating must be executed without
any errors. This corresponds to the view that most applica-
tions will consist of computations that may be executed on a
best-eort basis, and others that may not.
GLVQ is a supervised learning algorithm that is used for
classifying input data into one of a pre-determined set of
1 eort and guaranteed components. While there are several
The errors are injected to represent the impact of executing
K-means on a best-eort computing platform. More detailed
evaluations considering the exact nature of errors introduced
are presented in [16, 17, 18, 19]. We believe that this sim-
ple model is adequate to illustrate the forgiving nature of K-
means, since the net eect of errors in the computations of each
iteration of the K-means algorithm is to change the clusters to
which the points are assigned.
50.2
classes [20]. Similar to K-means, inputs are encoded as vectors
in a multi-dimensional space. During training, the algorithm
10% builds a model from the labeled training data set by creating a
5% set of reference vectors to represent each class of data. During
1%
classication, the distance from the input to all the reference
0.1%
0%
vectors is computed and used to assign the input to one of
(a) the classes. We focus on the computation-intensive training
phase of the GLVQ algorithm, which performs the following
operations for each training input vector.
1. Compute distances between the labeled training vector
and all reference vectors.
2. Identify the closest reference vector RV1 in the correct
class, and the closest reference vector RV2 from all the
incorrect classes.
3. Suitably update the two chosen reference vectors so that
RV1 moves closer to the training vector, and RV2 moves
farther from it.
(b)
0% The above computations are performed for each training vec-
10% tor, and the process is iterated until the quality of the model
50% does not improve. In the case of GLVQ, we evaluated the
90%
forgiving nature of the algorithm by executing a software im-
plementation that was used to detect faces in images. During
the execution of the algorithm, we injected errors in the re-
sults computed by each iteration, i.e., the reference vectors.
Figure 3(b) presents the results of our evaluation. Again, the
dierent curves represent dierent rates of error injection and
each curve shows how the quality of the model improves as the
algorithm iterates to convergence. In the case of GLVQ, we
note that error rates of up to 50% have very little impact on
the nal quality of the model constructed.
While we have focused on just two representative applica-
tions, we would like to reiterate that the forgiving nature is
observed across a wide range of application domains, including
digital signal processing, multimedia (image, video, and audio)
processing, network processing, wireless communications, and
recognition and data Mining. The causes and extent of the
forgiving nature may vary, but we believe that most if not all
of these workloads can benet from the proposed best-eort
computing model.
5. BEST-EFFORT SOFTWARE AND HARD-
WARE: ILLUSTRATIONS
The forgiving nature of computing workloads suggests that
the traditional interface of guaranteed execution of computa-
tions may be changed by the underlying computing platform.
In this section, we provide concrete examples of how parallel
hardware and software can be re-designed based on the best-
eort service model. First, we address the problem of how to
partition the computations in an application into best-eort
and guaranteed computations through parallel programming
models. Second, we discuss how a given computing platform
can scale to handle larger workloads by dropping (not execut-
ing) some of the best-eort computations. Next, we discuss
how scalable parallel execution can be obtained by taking ad-
vantage of the forgiving nature of the workload to alleviate the
bottlenecks to parallel execution. We describe how the best-
eort model can be taken down into the hardware by incorpo-
rating knobs that modulate the eort expended by hardware
towards computing correct results. Finally, we discuss how the
best-eort model may be used to build computing platforms
from unreliable components, without incurring excessive over-
heads for fault tolerance.
5.1 Best-effort parallel programming models
Applications that execute on a best-eort computing plat-
form must address the separation of computations into best-
possible approaches to achieving this separation, we believe
that approaches that minimize the additional burden on the
programmer are desirable. Towards that goal, Meng et al. [16]
proposed parallel programming templates such that the identi-
cation of best-eort computations is a natural by-product of
specifying the algorithm using the template. For example, Fig-
ure 4 presents a template for iterative-convergence algorithms
that naturally embodies the concept of best-eort computing.
868

iterate {
mask[0:M] = filter();
parallel_for(0 to N with mask batch P) {
..
}
} until converged( );
Figure 4: Iterative-convergence programming model
for best-eort computing [16]
Figure 5: Scalability of the K-means workload (error
vs. execution time) for various best-eort computing
strategies [16]
The template naturally captures algorithms that iteratively
perform a parallel computation until a specied convergence
criterion is achieved. This iterative-convergence template was
applied to specify the K-means and GLVQ algorithms, and
other recognition and mining algorithms [16, 17]. Several
strategies to identify best-eort computations were presented
in [16] based on the iterative-convergence template. For ex-
ample, computations within the inner parallel_for loop that
do not have an impact on the result (e.g., their outputs do
not change) for a few iterations can be identied through the
filter operator and marked as best-eort computations. Al-
though the iterations of the parallel_for loop may carry de-
pendencies, batches of the loop iterations may be executed in
parallel ignoring the dependencies. Finally, various conver-
gence criteria may be used to identify iterations of the outer
iterate loop that have a minimal impact on the output and
mark them as best-eort computations.
5.2 Managing computing workloads
The ability of a given computing platform to handle work-
loads can be enhanced by selectively dropping (not executing)
some of the best-eort computations. This is a strategy for
load management that is used in network routers, as well as
in specic applications such as web servers. We propose an
extension of this concept to manage a broader class of com-
puting workloads. Meng et al. [16] demonstrated that, in the
context of Recognition and Mining workloads, signicant per-
formance improvements can be obtained by not executing some
of the best-eort computations. Reducing the workload leads
to speedups on both sequential and parallel computing plat-
forms. Figure 5 illustrates this scalability in the context of
the K-means algorithm executing on an 8-core parallel plat-
form. Using various best-eort computing strategies described
in [16], we observe that it is possible to scale the computing
workload by two orders of magnitude, while the error intro-
duced in the output due to dropping the best-eort computa-
tions varies up to around 10% of the points being mis-classied.
This scalability can be exploited to process larger data sets on
a given computing platform, or to handle surges in workload
without degrading application performance.
5.3 Improving scalability of parallel execution
The forgiving nature of applications can be exploited to en-
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50.2
Figure 6: Improving scalability of parallel execution
for GLVQ classication [17]
Figure 7: Energy-eciency improvements through
scalable-eort hardware [19]
able them to scale to computing platforms with larger num-
bers of processing cores. In this case, we do not wish to reduce
the amount of computation executed; rather, we would like to
shape the workload so that its performance scales better with
larger numbers of cores. Towards this goal, Meng et al. [17]
and Byna et al. [18] analyze workloads whose parallel scala-
bility is limited by bottlenecks to parallel execution, such as
communication, synchronization, and run-time library over-
heads, leading to sub-optimal performance on multi-core and
many-core (GPU) platforms. They propose a technique called
dependency relaxation, which selectively relaxes data depen-
dencies between tasks, and show how it can be applied to cre-
ate increased parallelism, improve the granularity of parallel
tasks, and reduce the o-chip memory and coherence trac.
Figure 6 presents representative results for the GLVQ appli-
cation running on a multi-core platform with 8 cores. In con-
trast to the original implementation, whose parallel scalability
is severely limited by the granularity of the parallel tasks and
run-time overheads, the dependency relaxed implementation
demonstrates near-linear speedup for up to 8 cores.
5.4 Taking best-effort into hardware
The best-eort model can be used to re-think hardware de-
sign and implementation. Traditionally, hardware has been
designed to implement a given specication exactly, based on
the concepts of Boolean or numerical equivalence. Chippa et
al. [19] propose a design approach called scalable eort hard-
ware that takes advantage of the forgiving nature of applica-
tions to achieve improvements in energy eciency. The key
idea is to incorporate knobs that regulate the computational
eor expended by the hardware towards performing compu-
tation correctly, and to regulate these knobs to achieve the
desired quality of the output at minimal energy consumption.
They illustrate how such knobs can be identied at dierent
levels of design abstraction, namely at the algorithm, archi-
tecture, and circuit levels. These concepts are applied to the
design of a hardware processor for Support Vector Machines
(SVMs). At the algorithm level, the number of support vectors
and the number of dimensions of each vector can be modulated
to trade o the number of operations for accuracy of the result.

At the architecture level, the number of processing elements
and the precision of each processing element are regulated in
order to provide just enough computational accuracy. At the
circuit level, the concept of voltage over-scaling (scaling the
supply voltage while keeping the clock frequency xed, thereby
introducing errors in the outputs of processing elements) is uti-
lized together with enabling circuit-level design techniques, in
order to obtain improved energy eciency at the cost of errors
introduced into the operations of the algorithm. By combining
these knobs, the hardware implementation can be regulated to
expend just enough eort to achieve the desired output ac-
curacy. As illustrated in Figure 7, energy improvements of
2X-3X are reported as compared to a well-optimized conven-
tional hardware implementation.
5.5 Dealing with unreliable hardware
With continued scaling of feature sizes, transistors and in-
terconnects are expected to become increasingly unreliable due
to escalating defects, soft errors, and process variations. In the
face of high defect or error rates, classical fault-tolerant design
techniques (based on spatial and/or temporal redundancy) will
become either very expensive or ineective. Recently, there
has been a proposal to design multi-core computing platforms
by combining a small number of reliable processing cores with a
large number of unreliable cores, and exploiting this asymmet-
ric reliability using a suitable software architecture [21]. Such
an architecture will have a larger number of cores, thereby po-
tentially improving performance, compared to an architecture
that only uses fully reliable cores (since reliable cores are signif-
icantly larger than unreliable cores). We have recently demon-
strated that the best-eort computing model can be combined
with the architecture proposed in [21] to take full advantage of
the forgiving nature of computing workloads. The separation
of computations into best-eort and guaranteed computations
can be used to drive the assignment of computations to the
reliable and unreliable cores. We have also demonstrated that
simultaneously exploiting the forgiving nature of the workloads
through software techniques (dropping computations, relaxing
data dependencies) and execution on unreliable cores can lead
to signicantly better performance than either of these tech-
niques alone [22].
6. SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION
The emergence of mainstream parallel computing mandates
that applications scale in performance primarily by taking ad-
vantage of increasing numbers of cores. Motivated by ap-
proaches used to design large scale networking and storage sys-
tems, we propose best-eort computing as a model for future
parallel computing platforms. Under the best-eort model, dif-
ferent layers of the computing platform stack are designed to
provide a best-eort service, relaxing conventional guarantees
of complete or correct execution. We presented a conceptual
model for a best-eort computing platform, described charac-
teristics of applications that can leverage such a platform, and
provided concrete examples of parallel software and hardware
design techniques that adopt the best-eort approach to signif-
icantly improve performance and energy eciency. We believe
that the best-eort model can also be exploited to optimize
many other computing platform metrics like cost or system
management eort of the computing infrastructure.
We would also like to mention some of the challenges that
must be overcome in order to facilitate adoption of the best-
eort model described in this paper. The best-eort model in-
creases the burden on application developers since they must
partition their applications into computations that can work
with a best-eort service model and computations that can-
not. The development of programming models, such as the
iterative-convergence template described in this paper, for a
wide range of algorithms and computational patterns, will alle-
viate this burden. Alternatively, for some applications it may
be better to use programming language extensions to mark
the regions in a program that correspond to best-eort com-
putations. An important question that must be addressed is
to what extent the underlying platform should actually take
advantage of the forgiving nature of the best-eort computa-
tions (i.e., how aggressively should it drop or incorrectly ex-
ecute these computations). In this context, we note that in
870
50.2
the networking domain, best-eort does equal highly unreli-
able. Only a very small degradation in reliability is actually
encountered in practice. Finding the right extent to which the
forgiving nature of each application should be exploited will
require further investigation. Similar to the concept of dier-
entiated services in networking, it may be interesting to ex-
plore further classication of the best-eort computations into
dierent categories that are treated dierently by the comput-
ing platform. Finally, in the context of both parallel hardware
and software, techniques used for verifying the implementation
must account for the fact that numerical or Boolean equiva-
lence may no longer be maintained. Despite these challenges,
we believe that the potential benets of the best-eort com-
puting model (such as improvements in performance, energy
eciency, and scalability) make it very appealing as a direction
for future research in parallel hardware and software systems.
Acknowledgment: We acknowledge Jiayuan Meng, Suren
Byna, Srihari Cadambi, Hyungmin Cho, Vinay Chippa, De-
babrata Mohapatra, and Kaushik Roy, whose inputs have
greatly shaped our thoughts on best-eort computing.
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