Prof. William Kahan of the University of California at Berkeley presented 27 lectures during May-July 1988. The university listed them as graduate-level class CS 279 titled Computer System Support for Scientific and Engineering Computation. To Kahan, the course was really The Floating Point Exposé, a presentation of the state of computer arithmetic in the context of massive change wrought by emerging IEEE Standard 754.
This web page contains a re-creation of this one-time course designed for a combination academic and industry audience. Some 88 students registered. Many attended remotely via VCR recordings. Students took turns publishing notes for the lectures. David Hough, who coordinated the lectures at Sun Microsystems in Mountain View, California, distributed those notes along with over two thousand pages of other handouts.The three sections below contain the lectures, with notes often including the overhead transparencies and links to the complete collection of handouts. CS 279 is right here!
Handouts Combined Table of Contents 1990
Handouts Updated Combined Table of Contents Sets 14-17 1990
Handouts Final Sun Internal Combined Table of Contents 1990
Mailing address verification letter 1990
Some documents appear twice. Form (A) has typewriter formatting suitable for a dot matrix printer. Form (B) is typeset for a laser printer.
Analog Devices, ADSP-3212/ADSP-3222 Floating-Point Chipset Data Sheet
Analog Devices, DSP Products Data Book, 1987
Apple, Language Specifications for SANE Pascal
Apple, Numerics Manual excerpts
Arioli, M., Demmel, J., Duff, I., Solving Sparse Linear Systems with Sparse Backward Error
AT&T, Excerpts from System V Interface Definition
AT&T, WE 32-Bit Microprocessors and Peripherals Data Book
Barnett, D., A Portable Floating-Point Environment (May 87)
Barnett, D., A Portable Floating-Point Environment (Dec 87)
Bohlender, G., Ullrich, C., von Gudenberg, J., New Developments in PASCAL-SC
Breed, L., Floating Arithmetic on 4.3/RT
Breed, L., IBM S/370 Floating Point Format
Coonen, J., Contributions to a Proposed Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic
Cydrome, Cydra 5 Directed Data Flow Architecture
Cydrome, Cydra 5 Performance Briefs
Cyrix, FasMath 83D87 User's Manual
Cyrix, FasMath 83S87 User's Manual
Cyrix, FasMath CX-EMC87 Coprocessor Data Sheet
Demmel, J., The Probability That A Numerical Analysis Problem Is Difficult
Demmel, J., Underflow and the Reliability of Numerical Software
Excerpts from Proposed ANSI C Standard
Farnum, C., Compiler support for floating-point computation (Aug 87)
Farnum, C., Compiler Support for Floating-point Computation (Dec 87)
Ferguson, W., Matula, D., Rationally Biased Arithmetic
GAMM Resolution on Computer Arithmetic
Goldberg, D., What Every Computer Scientist Should Know about Floating-Point Arithmetic
Grosse, E., Moler, C., Underflow Can Hurt
Hough, D., Additional Floating-Point Indoctrination Exercises
Hough, D., Applications of the Proposed IEEE 754 Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic
Hough, D., Comments on Proposed ANSI C Standard, Jan 88 draft
Hough, D., Comments on Proposed ANSI C Standard, May 88 draft
Hough, D., Elementary Functions Based upon IEEE Arithmetic
Hough, D., Some current publication abstracts
Hough, D., Some more current publication abstracts
Hough, D., Still more current publication abstracts
Hough, D., The Last Example on Gradual Underflow!
HP, Excerpts from HP15C Advanced Functions Handbook
IMACS-GAMM International Symposium on Computer Arithmetic and Self-Validating Numerical Methods
Intel, 80286 and 80287 Programmer's Reference Manual
Intel, 80387 Programmer's Reference Manual
Intel, 80960KB Programmer's Reference Manual
Isaacson,E., Review of Numerical Recipes, The Art of Scientific Computing
Kahan, W., 20 Challenges for Computerized Symbolic Algebra Systems
Kahan, W., 7094 II System Support for Numerical Analysis
Kahan, W., A More Complete Interval Arithmetic
Kahan, W., A Survey of Error Analysis
Kahan, W., An Exercise in Technical Support (A)
Kahan, W., An Exercise in Technical Support (B)
Kahan, W., Branch Cuts for Complex Elementary Functions, or Much Ado about Nothing's Sign Bit
Kahan, W., Bumps on the Path to Floating-Point Progress
Kahan, W., Calculating Area and Angle of a Needle-like Triangle A
Kahan, W., Calculating Area and Angle of a Needle-like Triangle B
Kahan, W., Checking Whether Floating-Point Division Is Correctly Rounded
Kahan, W., Conserving Confluence Curbs Ill-Condition
Kahan, W., Doubled-Precision IEEE Standard 754 Floating-Point Arithmetic
Kahan, W., Elementary Functions from Kernels (A)
Kahan, W., Elementary Functions from Kernels (B)
Kahan, W., Elementary Inequalities among Elementary Functions (A)
Kahan, W., Elementary Inequalities among Elementary Functions (B)
Kahan, W., Five Frightening Facts about Floating-Point Arithmetic (A)
Kahan, W., Five Frightening Facts about Floating-Point Arithmetic (B)
Kahan, W., Frexp/Ldexp vs. Logb/Scalb (A)
Kahan, W., Frexp/Ldexp vs. Logb/Scalb (B)
Kahan, W., Gaussian Elimination with Extra-Precise Accumulation of Products
Kahan, W., Handling Arithmetic Exceptions
Kahan, W., Interval Arithmetic Options in the Proposed IEEE Floating Point Arithmetic Standard
Kahan, W., Jean-Michel Muller's Example
Kahan, W., Larry Breed's Experiment (A)
Kahan, W., Larry Breed's Experiment (B)
Kahan, W., Machine-independent Algorithms for floor(x) and ceil(x)
Kahan, W., Mathematics Written in Sand – the hp-15C, Intel 8087, etc.
Kahan, W., No Period Two Implies Convergence, or Why Use Tangents when Secants Will Do?
Kahan, W., Numerical Linear Algebra
Kahan, W., On Alleged Mathematical Optimality (A)
Kahan, W., On Alleged Mathematical Optimality (B)
Kahan, W., Periodic Integrals vs. Prohibition of tan(π/2) = ∞.
Kahan, W., Presubstitution, and Continued Fractions
Kahan, W., ProdQuot: Avoid undeserved over/underflow May 18 (A)
Kahan, W., ProdQuot: Avoid undeserved over/underflow May 18 (B)
Kahan, W., Rational Arithmetic in Floating-Point
Kahan, W., Roundoff in Polynomial Evaluation (A)
Kahan, W., Roundoff in Polynomial Evaluation (B)
Kahan, W., Specifications for Exponentiation xy over the Extended Reals X
Kahan, W., Superlinear Convergence of a Remes Algorithm
Kahan, W., The Errror-Analyst's Quandary
Kahan, W., The Persistence of Irrationals in Some Integrals
Kahan, W., To Solve a Real Cubic Equation
Kahan, W., To Test Whether Binary Floating-Point Multiplication Is Correctly Rounded.
Kahan, W., Why do we need a floating-point arithmetic standard?
Kahan, W., Demmel, J., Accurate Singular Values and Vectors of an Upper Triangular 2-by-2 Matrix (A)
Kahan, W., Demmel, J., Accurate Singular Values and Vectors of an Upper Triangular 2-by-2 Matrix (B)
Kahan, W., Demmel, J., Coonen, J., Proposed Floating Point Environmental Inquiries in FORTRAN
Kahan, W., Haugeland, W., Hough, D., Implementation of Algorithms, Part 1
Kahan, W., Haugeland, W., Hough, D., Implementation of Algorithms, Part 2
Kahan, W., LeBlanc, E., Anomalies in the IBM ACRITH Package
Kahan, W., Ng, K., SQRT – annotated square root algorithms in C
Kahan, W., Parlett, B., Can You Count on Your Calculator?
Kahan, W., Tang, P., An Experiment with ACRITH
Killian, E., MIPS Floating Point Architecture
Killian, E., VAX Floating Point
Kirchner, R., Kulisch, U., Arithmetic for Vector Processors
Kornerup, P., Matula, D., Finite Precision Lexicographic Continued Fraction Number Systems
Kulisch, U., FORTRAN-SC: FORTRAN for Scientific Computation
Kulisch, U., Literature on Scientific Computation
Kulisch, U., Products Incorporating ACRITH
Kulisch, U., Miranker, W., The Arithmetic of the Digital Computer: A New Approach
Lee, C., Multi-Step Gradual Rounding
Lieutier, A., Precision Improvement of Software Algorithms: AEROLIS
Matula, D., Kornerup, P., Rationally Biased Rounding Can Be Beneficial (A)
Matula, D., Kornerup, P., Rationally Biased Rounding Can Be Beneficial (B)
McDonald, S., Algorithms for Extended Transcendentals
Motorola, MC68881/MC68882 Floating-Point Coprocessor User's Manual
Mueller, M., Portable exp(x) in C
National Semiconductor, NS32580 Series Floating Point Controller
Numerical Algorithms Group, FPV: a Floating-Point Validation package
P854: A Proposed Radix- and Word-length-independent Standard for Floating-point Arithmetic
Rump, S., How Reliable Are Results of Computers?
Sanguinetti, J., Micro-Analysis of the Titan's Operation Pipe
Shampine,L., Review of Numerical Recipes, The Art of Scientific Computing
Stanley, K., Weitek Business: Solutions To Floating Point Intensive Problems
Sterbenz, P., Floating-Point Computation
Sun, Appendix N: SPARC IEEE 754 Implementation Recommendations
Sun, SunOS 3 man pages relating to floating point
Sun, SunOS 3M Mathematical Library man pages
Sun, SunOS Fortran man pages relating to floating point
Sun, SunOS /usr/include files relating to floating point
Taylor, G., Compatible Hardware for Division and Square Root
Teubner announcement of Computerarithmetic: Scientific Computation and Programming Languages
Thacher, C., Comments on Floating-Point Indoctrination Syllabus
Texas Instruments, SN74ACT8800 Family Data Manual
Vollaro, T., The Minisupercomputer: One User's Experience
Weitek, WTL 1164/WTL 1165 64-Bit IEEE Floating Point Multiplier/Divider and ALU
Weitek, WTL 3167 Floating-Point Coprocessor
Yuval, G., Notes on Kahan's A Distillation Program
Many people contributed to the creation of this class and to this re-creation from boxes of VCR tapes and paper. The source materials survive in the archives of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Thanks go to Prof. Emeritus Kahan for his enthusiastic support.
© 2024 Jerome Coonen