The draft Posit Standard may be released by the time of the conference as well.

Keynote

Perfect Math Libraries Without Sacrificing Speed: The Minefield Method

John Gustafson

A*STAR and NUS – Singapore

Abstract:

Port any program using floating-point arithmetic from one platform to another, and you are likely to get different results. The most common reason is an issue that has been known for centuries: Elementary functions such as cosine, logarithm, exponential, etc. are excruciatingly difficult to round for certain input arguments, so the designers of math libraries ask us to accept a few errors in the last bit. The problem is that those errors are inconsistent from one library to another. While methods of assuring correct rounding for every value are known, they slow the function evaluations down by a huge factor. A recent breakthrough technique, the “Minefield Method,” demonstrates a new way to achieve perfect rounding with low-order approximations, eliminating the historical tradeoff between speed and correctness; you can have both. The Draft Posit Standard therefore requires all standard functions  be correctly rounded for all input arguments so that posit calculations, unlike those using IEEE 754 Standard floats, can at last produce bitwise-identical results across platforms.