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K - Roundoff Noise in Scientific Computations

from APPENDICES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Bernard Widrow
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
István Kollár
Affiliation:
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
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Summary

Roundoff errors in calculations are often neglected by scientists. The success of the IEEE double precision standard makes most of us think that the precision of a simple personal computer is virtually infinite. Common sense cannot really grasp the meaning of 16 precise decimal digits.

However, roundoff errors can easily destroy the result of a calculation, even if it looks reasonable. Therefore, it is worth investigating them even for IEEE double precision representation.

COMPARISON TO REFERENCE VALUES

Investigation of roundoff errors is most straightforwardly based on comparison of the results to reference values, that is, to the outcome of an ideally precise calculation.

First of all, we need to note that the way of comparison is not well defined. It is usually done by looking at the difference of the finite precision result and of the reference value. This is very reasonable, but cannot be applied in all cases. If, for example, we investigate a stand–alone resonant system, the reference and the finite precision results could be two similar sine waves, with slightly different frequency. In such a case, the difference of the imprecise result and precise result grows significantly with time, although the outputs are still very similar. Therefore, the basis of comparison needs to be chosen very carefully.

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Quantization Noise
Roundoff Error in Digital Computation, Signal Processing, Control, and Communications
, pp. 697 - 710
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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