Accurate Floating-Point Summation Part I: Faithful Rounding

Given a vector of floating-point numbers with exact sum s, we present an algorithm for calculating a faithful rounding of s, i.e. the result is one of the immediate floating-point neighbors of s. If the sum s is a floating-point number, we prove that this is the result of our algorithm. The algorithm adapts to the condition number of the sum, i.e. it is fast for mildly conditioned sums with slowly increasing computing time proportional to the logarithm of the condition number. All statements are also true in the presence of underflow. The algorithm does not depend on the exponent range. Our algorithm is fast in terms of measured computing time because it allows good instruction-level parallelism, it neither requires special operations such as access to mantissa or exponent, it contains no branch in the inner loop, nor does it require some extra precision: The only operations used are standard floating-point addition, subtraction and multiplication in one working precision, for example ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIAMSC
• Authors: Siegfried M. Rump, Takeshi Ogita, Shin'ichi Oishi
• Keywords: Algorithm, Condition Number, Floating-point Number, SIAMSC 2008