Abstract:The concept of approximate computing, which fills the gap between the accuracy provided by a system and that required by an application for improving energy and performance, can be applied to communication technology in parallel and distributed computer systems. This talk focuses on photonic approximate communication that highlights the ultimate nature of light. With classical communication, each signal is processed one bit at a time. In contrast, this approximate computing performs multi-value processing on each wavelength, making it possible to improve processing speeds up to ten times the current speeds. Using multi-value processing may lead to low reliability and low technological maturity, which become a new research challenge. Approximate communication techniques are classified into lossy data compression, imperfect hardware usage, and approximate synchronization in parallel processing. This talk illustrates their case studies, including our research outputs in an FPGA cluster using an optical interconnection network.