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Workshop on computer arithmetic

Original version: Tue Nov 5 08:13:32 2019 Updates: Mon Nov 11 05:54:50 2019    Wed Nov 13 16:47:32 2019                Valid HTML 4.0!


Attendees received a folder with several documents. For copyright reasons, only the first three can be placed here for free download. Links are provided to commercial sources for the remaining ones.

Participants were told about the various IEEE 754 floating-point standards. Here is a link to the latest one. They were also recommended to read David Goldberg's What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic, ACM Computing Surveys 23(1) 5--48 March 1991, with corrections from 23(3) 413 September 1991. The latter is regrettably not available at the publisher's Web site, but I have a journal subscription, and personal archives of all issues of that journal. A PDF file of the corrections page is available here.

David Goldberg has also written a longer document on computer arithmetic with more details of low-level hardware implementation; it appears as appendices in successive editions of John Hennessey and David Patterson's famous book series Computer Architecture: a Quantitative Approach. Goldberg's Appendix J: Computer Arithmetic from the fifth edition in 2012 is available here. The sixth edition of the book appeared in 2019, and its appendices are bundled in a single InfoZIP file. The material in its Appendix J appears to be largely similar to that in the previous book edition.

I maintain an extensive, and frequently updated, bibliography on floating-point and integer arithmetic. It is freely available in several formats: BibTeX, HTML (similar appearance, but with live hyperlinks), and as an SQLite3 database. If you are unfamiliar with SQL (Structured Query Language) for database access, you can find many examples in the bibsql paper available at a link from this site.