文件名称：Evaluation of IEEE 754 Floating -Point Arithmetic
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更新时间：2016-08-28 02:42:03
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Title：Evaluation of IEEE 754 Floating -Point Arithmetic Compliance Across a Wide Range of Heterogeneous Computers Introduction：Scientific applications rely heavily on floating-point arithmetic[1] and, therefore, are affected by the precision and implementation of floating-point ope rations.Although the computers we use are IEEE compliant, this only assures the same representation of floating-point numbers; it does not guarantee that floating- point operations will be performed in the same way on all computers [ 4]. This may result in divergences in intermediate results that can be significantly amplified by the chaotic nature of some applications [ 2], where loops are iterated a large number of times, leading to significantly different final results when a computation, e.g., a simulat ion, is performed on different computers [ 6]. Since such behavior can constrain the employment of multiple computers in scientific research, this problem is an important one. Accordingly, this paper reports on our findings of running a well - known test sui te, IeeeCC754, that is used to evaluate IEEE 754 compliance across a wide range of heterogeneous computers with different architectures, operating systems, precisions, and compilers. The rest of the paper is organized as follow s. In Section 2 we give a s hort overview of the IEEE 754 floating - point arithmetic standard. Sections 3 and 4 describe the IeeeCC754 test suite and the way we use it to evaluate IEEE 754 compliance across a set of heterogeneous computer systems. Our test results are presented in Section 5. Sections 6 and 7 discuss future work and summarize the contribution of this paper.