Colloquium: Accurate High Performance Maths Libraries and Their Testing

by Mick Pont (NAG Ltd)

Wednesday 21 May 2003, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

500/1-001 - Main Auditorium (CERN)

When building numerical libraries for modern high-performance architectures, it is important to ensure that as well as creating fast code we do not lose sight of the fact that the answers must be correct. With particular reference to recent work in collaboration with chip manufacturers AMD for their new Opteron 64-bit processors, we discuss the ways and means by which we try to assure correctness, while giving some insight into NAG's methods of quality control. We will look at low level routines such as trig functions from the standard mathematical library libm, as well as higher level numerical codes such as BLAS and LAPACK, and also show some comparative graphs of timing results.

Biography
Mick Pont has been with NAG since 1984, spending time in NAG's UK and North American offices. He is currently a senior member of NAG's Development Division, in Oxford. During his time at NAG Mick has worked on various topics including testing of floating-point arithmetic, numerical library development, and the visualisation system IRIS Explorer.