arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Vincent Lefèvre.
In this paper, we improve the usual relative error bound for the computation of x^n through iterated multiplications by x in binary floating-point arithmetic. The obtained error bound is only slightly better than the usual one, but it is simpler. We also discuss the more general problem of computing the product of n terms.
We introduce two algorithms for accurately evaluating powers to a positive integer in floating-point arithmetic, assuming a fused multiply-add (fma) instruction is available. We show that our log-time algorithm always produce faithfully-rounded results, discuss the possibility of getting correctly rounded results, and show that results correctly rounded in double precision can be obtained if extended-precision is available with the possibility to round into double precision (with a single rounding).
We study the multiple-precision addition of two positive floating-point numbers in base 2, with exact rounding, as specified in the MPFR library, i.e. where each number has its own precision. We show how the best possible complexity (up to a constant factor that depends on the implementation) can be obtain.