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Section: New Results
Computer arithmetic
Participant : Sylvain Collange.
Application-specific number systems
Collaboration with Mark G. Arnold, XLNS Research, USA.
Reconfigurable FPGA platforms let designers build efficient application-specific circuits, when the performance or energy efficiency of general-purpose CPUs is insufficient, and the production volume is not enough to offset the very high cost of building a dedicated integrated circuit (ASIC). One way to take advantage of the flexibility offered by FPGAs is to tailor arithmetic operators for the application. In particular, the Logarithmic Number System (LNS) is suitable for embedded applications dealing with low-precision, high-dynamic range numbers.
Like floating-point, LNS can represent numbers from a wide dynamic range with constant relative accuracy. However, while standard floating-point offer so-called subnormal numbers to represent numbers close to zero with constant absolute accuracy, LNS numbers abruptly overflow to zero, resulting in a gap in representable numbers close to zero that can impact the accuracy of numerical algorithms.
In collaboration with Mark G. Arnold, Sylvain Collange proposed a generalization of LNS that incorporates features analogous to subnormal floating-point [14] . The Denormal LNS (DLNS) system we introduce defines a class of hybrid number systems that offer quasi-constant absolute accuracy close to zero and quasi-constant relative accuracy on larger numbers. These systems can be configured to range from pure LNS (constant relative accuracy) to fixed-point (constant absolute accuracy across the whole range).
Deterministic floating-point primitives for high-performance computing
Parallel algorithms such as reduction are ubiquitous in parallel programming, and especially high-performance computing. Although these algorithms rely on associativity, they are use on floating-point data, on which operations are not associative. As a result, computations become non-deterministic, and the result may change according to static and dynamic parameters such as machine configuration or task scheduling.
In collaboration with David Defour (UPVD), Stef Graillat and Roman Iakymchuk (LIP6), we introduce a solution to compute deterministic sums of floating-point numbers efficiently and with the best possible accuracy. A multi-level algorithm incorporating a filtering stage that uses fast vectorized floating-point expansions and an accumulation stage based on super-accumulators in a high-radix carry-save representation guarantees accuracy to the last bit even on degenerate cases while maintaining high performance in the common cases [35] .