Re: requiring hardware is futile
All,
I agree 100% with this assessment.
Baker
P.S. I'm sorry to have lagged in reading postings to this list.
I've been working with our new publisher and the editorial
board in setting up the Reliable Computing journal, and
have been working on administrative issues associated with
P1788, besides university duties.
I'll get to everything eventually :-)
David Hough 754R work wrote:
What does it mean to require hardware support of intervals?
All Turing machines support interval arithmetic; it's a "simple matter of
programming."
Is a microcoded implementation count as hardware or software?
What about an optional external coprocessor card for interval processing?
I think that requiring hardware implementation really amounts
to requiring some minimal level of performance so that interval
methods are competitive with other methods for solving problems.
However that's very hard to specify, since there are so many ways of measuring
performance and "easy to measure" and "relevant to end user" are usually disjoint.
That's why language standards groups generally refuse to touch this issue - it's
not just an IEEE idiosyncrasy. Quality of implementation issues are up to
the user to decide based on criteria relevant to the user.
To see where this leads, one can look at the various SPEC results which aren't
more than a very general sort of help to users because they correlate so poorly
with delivered performance of ISV applications on which most computer performance
procurement depends.
Even so, the best way to get interval performance improved is probably to get
1788 finalized, then get language standards that support 1788, then get realistic
open source applications written according to those language standards
that can be used to compare performance on
platforms, then get an organization like SPEC to select a few of those to measure
interval performance, then get end users interested enough to make procurement
decisions based on those results. If all goes really well this could all happen
in ten years, but twenty might be a more realistic guess.
--
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R. Baker Kearfott, rbk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (337) 482-5346 (fax)
(337) 482-5270 (work) (337) 993-1827 (home)
URL: http://interval.louisiana.edu/kearfott.html
Department of Mathematics, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
(Room 217 Maxim D. Doucet Hall, 1403 Johnston Street)
Box 4-1010, Lafayette, LA 70504-1010, USA
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