Title: Extended precision with a rounding mode toward zero environment. Application to the Cell processor

Authors: Hong Diep Nguyen, Stef Graillat, Jean-Luc Lamotte

Addresses: CNRS, UMR 7606, LIP6, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, 4 place Jussieu, F-75252, Paris cedex 05, France. ' CNRS, UMR 7606, LIP6, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, 4 place Jussieu, F-75252, Paris cedex 05, France. ' CNRS, UMR 7606, LIP6, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, 4 place Jussieu, F-75252, Paris cedex 05, France

Abstract: In the field of scientific computing, the exactness of the calculation is of prime importance. That leads to efforts made to increase the precision of the floating point algorithms. One of them is to increase the precision of the floating point number to double or quadruple the working precision. The building block of these efforts is the Error-Free Transformations (EFT). In this paper, we develop EFT operations in truncation rounding mode optimised for the Cell processor. They have been implemented and used in double precision library using only single precision numbers. We compare the performance of our library with the native one in double precision on vectors operations. In the best case, the performance of our library is very closed to the standard double precision implementation. The work could be easily extended to obtain quadruple precision.

Keywords: extended precision; rounding mode; zero; cell processors; floating point algorithms; error-free transformations; EFT.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRS.2009.026839

International Journal of Reliability and Safety, 2009 Vol.3 No.1/2/3, pp.153 - 173

Published online: 27 Jun 2009 *

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