We present an adaptive bitwidth allocation method for quantizing low-rank factors in hierarchical matrices in order to decrease storage while meeting a given constraint on their reconstruction error. For the bitwidth allocation we formulate a discrete storage minimization problem and show that an optimal assignment can give larger singular values at least as many bits as smaller ones. We further develop a greedy algorithm that meets the specified max-norm quantization error budget. We investigate a hierarchical block partition in which all of the non-diagonal blocks are represented by quantized low-rank factors and only dense blocks remain dense; in this way a global reconstruction bound related to $η_k$ and $R_k$ is obtained, with the former and latter being bounds on the truncation and reconstruction arithmetic errors, respectively. Extensive simulations, carried out with kernel and BEM matrices under block-relative budgets, indicate that the proposed method achieves a reduction in storage of up to $44.3\times$ when compared to storing the complete matrix densely in FP64, and a reduction of up to $5.70\times$ when compared to the FP64 low-rank factors within the same partition, together with measured reconstruction errors that remained below the maximum norm bounds in all the hierarchical tests.
Reduced-precision arithmetic offers significant opportunities to improve performance, memory usage, and energy efficiency in numerical applications, provided that numerical accuracy is preserved. This work investigates automated precision tuning through customized floating-point formats with user-defined exponent and significand sizes, enabling the emulation of emerging low-precision formats and the exploration of non-standard precision configurations within a unified mixed-precision framework. The proposed methodology, implemented in the PROMISE precision autotuning tool, combines numerical validation with a systematic search to generate program variants that satisfy user-defined accuracy requirements. To address the computational cost of this exploration, a containerized benchmarking framework supports parallel execution across multiple algorithms and parameter configurations. The approach is evaluated on a suite of numerical programs, including linear solvers and applications from the Rodinia benchmark. Results show that a substantial proportion of variables can be safely reduced to lower precision while preserving accuracy, indicating that standard double precision is often over-provisioned. These findings highlight the potential of automated precision tuning to derive efficient mixed-precision configurations tailored to application-specific accuracy requirements.