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Is it infeasible to use something other than floats for such computations? There are many schemes for dealing with bigintegers, bigdecimals and such with reason
by lucian1900 15y ago
Is it infeasible to use something other than floats for such computations? There are many schemes for dealing with bigintegers, bigdecimals and such with reasonable performance.
- nzmsv 15y agoThere are some simulations that squeeze everything they can out of a GPU or a cluster or a TOP500 machine. And I don't think arbitrary precision can be done easily on a GPU; if someone knows more, I'd love to be corrected on this one.
- lucian1900 15y agoTOP500 machines probably have CPU features that could help with that. But yeah, afaik arbitrary precision on GPUs isn't possible with reasonable performance.
- ars 15y agoI don't think he means arbitrary precision, I think he means fixed point. And to answer him: Some programs can use it, some can't. IMO every program that can should, not not all do.
- nl 15y agoTop500 machine CPUs are usually your standard Intel or AMD CPUs[1]. In the current top 10, 5 are Intel, 4 are AMD (and 1 SPARC64). Many have Nvidia GPU co-processors. The only slightly exotic architecture in the top 10 is number 10, which supplements its AMD CPUs with Cell co-processors. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#November_2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#November_2011
- roel_v 15y agoBy 'schemes', do you mean hardware support? Because if not, using floats will be much much faster, in my (admittedly fairly limited) intuition.