Is it infeasible to use something other than floats for such computations? There are many schemes for dealing with bigintegers, bigdecimals and such with reasonable performance.
There are some simulations that squeeze everything they can out of a GPU or a cluster or a TOP500 machine. And I don't think arbitrary precision can be done easily on a GPU; if someone knows more, I'd love to be corrected on this one.
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Is it infeasible to use something other than floats for such computations? There are many schemes for dealing with bigintegers, bigdecimals and such with reasonable performance.
There are some simulations that squeeze everything they can out of a GPU or a cluster or a TOP500 machine. And I don't think arbitrary precision can be done easily on a GPU; if someone knows more, I'd love to be corrected on this one.
TOP500 machines probably have CPU features that could help with that.
But yeah, afaik arbitrary precision on GPUs isn't possible with reasonable performance.
I don't think he means arbitrary precision, I think he means fixed point.
And to answer him: Some programs can use it, some can't. IMO every program that can should, not not all do.
Top500 machine CPUs are usually your standard Intel or AMD CPUs[1].
In the current top 10, 5 are Intel, 4 are AMD (and 1 SPARC64). Many have Nvidia GPU co-processors.
The only slightly exotic architecture in the top 10 is number 10, which supplements its AMD CPUs with Cell co-processors.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#November_2011
By 'schemes', do you mean hardware support? Because if not, using floats will be much much faster, in my (admittedly fairly limited) intuition.