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New scalar and vector elementary functions for the IBM System/370

1986; IBM; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1147/rd.302.0126

2151-8556

Ramesh C. Agarwal, J.W. Cooley, Fred G. Gustavson, James B. Shearer, Gordon Slishman, Bryant Tuckerman,

Algorithms and Data Compression

Algorithms have been developed to compute short- and long-precision elementary functions: SIN, COS, TAN, COTAN, LOG, LOG10, EXP, POWER, SQRT, ATAN, ASIN, ACOS, ATAN2, and CABS, in scalar (28 functions) and vector (22 functions) mode. They have been implemented as part of the new VS FORTRAN library recently announced along with the IBM 3090 Vector Facility. These algorithms are essentially table-based algorithms. An important feature of these algorithms is that they produce bitwise-identical results on scalar and vector System/370 machines. Of these, for five functions the computed value result is always the correctly rounded value of the infinite-precision result. For the rest of the functions, the value returned is one of the two floating-point neighbors bordering the infinite-precision result, which implies exact results if they are machine-representable. For the five correctly rounded elementary functions, scalar and vector algorithms are designed independently so as to optimize performance in each case. For other functions, the bitwise-identical constraint leads to algorithms which compromise between scalar and vector performance. We have been able to design algorithms where this compromise is minimal and thus achieve very good performance on both scalar and vector implementations. For our test measurements on high-end System/370 machines, our scalar functions are always faster (sometimes by as much as a factor of 2.5) as compared to the old VS FORTRAN library. Our vector functions are usually two or three times faster than our scalar functions.