[Date Index] [Thread Index] [Author Index]

Re: Off by 0.00000001, Why?

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg37388] Re: [mg37378] Off by 0.00000001, Why?
• From: Sseziwa Mukasa <mukasa at jeol.com>
• Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 02:03:16 -0400 (EDT)
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

On Friday, October 25, 2002, at 02:48 AM, Steven T. Hatton wrote:

> I've Noticed that in a few instances my results differ slightly from 
> his.  I'm
> wondering why this is happeneing.  One would expect that the same 
> algorithm
> would produce identical results regardless of the system on which it 
> was run.
> I'm running on 4.2, and it's certain Dr M¡î¡×der was using an earlier 
> version.
> Could that be the cause of the descrepency?
>

This is not surprising.  First of all as you correctly pointed out the 
Mathematica routines you are calling may have changed and therefore 
produce different results.  Secondly your OS and hardware platform may 
not be identical and in my experience the same compiler may produce 
different results on different hardware and OS combinations due to 
different optimizations applied to floating point expressions.  
Finally, Intel chips have floating point registers that are actually 80 
bits wide.  Thus they perform some floating point operations 
differently than a pure 64 bit machine because they may use 80 bits for 
intermediate results.  See 
http://www.validlab.com/goldberg/addendum.html for a reasonable summary 
of the issues with floating point computations on different 
architectures.

> Any thoughts on this?
>

If your floating point calculations are mission critical you have to 
use a compiler which allows you to control whether floating point 
expressions are optimized.  Also you have to use a CPU architecture 
whose behavior you understand.  Finally all of your algorithms must be 
analyzed to guarantee you understand and have compensated for the 
floating point model of your compiler and CPU.  This is why mission 
critical code such as for NASA is typically audited by a team before 
being committed to production code.

Regards,

Ssezi