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Instabilities caused by floating-point arithmetic quantization.

It is shown that an otherwise stable digital control system can be made unstable by signal quantization when the controller operates on floating-point arithmetic. Sufficient conditions of instability are determined, and an example of loss of stability is treated when only one quantizer is operated.

Phillips, C. L.

Efficient Floating-Point Arithmetic on Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computers

We propose a novel floating-point encoding scheme that builds on prior work involving fixed-point encodings. We encode floating-point numbers using Two's Complement fixed-point mantissas and Two's Complement integral exponents. We used our proposed approach to develop quantum algorithms for fundamental arithmetic operations, such as bit-shifting, reciprocation, multiplication, and addition. We prototyped and investigated the performance of the floating-point encoding scheme on quantum computer simulations by performing reciprocation on randomly drawn inputs and by solving first-order ordinary differential equations, while varying the number of qubits in the encoding. We observed rapid convergence to the exact solutions as we increased the number of qubits and a significant reduction in the number of ancilla qubits required for reciprocation when compared with similar approaches.

Serrallés, José Cruz [Weill Cornell Med. Coll.]

Constrained Chebyshev approximations to some elementary functions suitable for evaluation with floating point arithmetic

Approximations which can be evaluated with precision using floating-point arithmetic are presented. The particular set of approximations thus far developed are for the function TAN and the functions of USASI FORTRAN excepting SQRT and EXPONENTIATION. These approximations are, furthermore, specialized to particular forms which are especially suited to a computer with a small memory, in that all of the approximations can share one general purpose subroutine for the evaluation of a polynomial in the square of the working argument.

Manos, P.

ComPort: Rigorous Testing Methods to Safeguard Software Porting (Final Technical Report)

This is a technical report from the lead institution – University of Utah, Kahlert School of Computing – funded under the Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research under award number DE-SC0022252. We summarize our work done over the three years of funding received. The relevant papers and software have already been uploaded at the DOE site.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING

Fast and Accurate Intersections on a Sphere

We introduce a fast, high-precision algorithm for calculating intersections between great circle arcs and lines of constant latitude on the unit sphere. We first propose a simplified intersection point formula with improved speed and numerical robustness over the ones traditionally implemented in geoscience software. We then show how algorithms based on the concept of error-free transformations (EFT) can be applied to evaluate this formula within a relative error bound that is on the order of machine precision. Here, we demonstrate that, with a vectorized and parallelized implementation, this enhanced accuracy is achieved with no compute time overhead compared to a direct calculation in hardware floating point, making our algorithm suitable for performance-sensitive applications like regridding of high-resolution climate data. In contrast, evaluating our formula using high-precision data types like quadruple precision and arbitrary precision, or using the robust intersection computation routines from the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library, leads to significant computational overhead, especially since these alternatives inhibit vectorization. More generally, our work demonstrates how EFT techniques can be combined and extended to implement nontrivial geometric calculations with high accuracy and speed.

Environmental sciences

An Input Routine Using Arithmetic Statements for the IBM 704 Digital Computer

An input routine has been designed for use with FORTRAN or SAP coded programs which are to be executed on an IBM 704 digital computer. All input to be processed by the routine is punched on IBM cards as declarative statements of the arithmetic type resembling the FORTRAN language. The routine is 850 words in length. It is capable of loading fixed- or floating-point numbers, octal numbers, and alphabetic words, and of performing simple arithmetic as indicated on input cards. Provisions have been made for rapid loading of arrays of numbers in consecutive memory locations.

Turner, Don N.