[lucian1900]

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.

[nzmsv]

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.

[lucian1900]

TOP500 machines probably have CPU features that could help with that.

But yeah, afaik arbitrary precision on GPUs isn't possible with reasonable performance.

[ars]

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.

[nl]

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

[roel_v]

By 'schemes', do you mean hardware support? Because if not, using floats will be much much faster, in my (admittedly fairly limited) intuition.