FloatX (Float eXtended)

FloatX is a header-only C++ library which extends floating point types beyond the native single and double (and on some hardware half) precision types. It provides template types which allow the user to select the number of bits used for the exponent and significand parts of the floating point number. The idea of FloatX is based on the FlexFloat library, but, instead of implementing the functionality in C and providing C++ wrappers, FloatX is written completely in C++, which makes it more natural to the end user. In addition, FloatX provides a superset of FlexFloat's functionalities.

Features

This section lists the functionalities provided by FloatX. Functionalities that are also provided by FlexFloat have (flexfloat) appended to the description.

• header-only library, without a compiled component, and heavy inlining, resulting in relatively high performance
• floatx<exp_bits, sig_bits, backend_float> class template, which allows emulation of non-native types with exp_bits exponent bits and sig_bits significand bits using a natively supported backend_float type to perform arithmetic operations (flexfloat - provides a similar functionality in the C++ wrapper, but the memory consumption of the flexfloat C++ class was suboptimal).
• floatxr<backend_float> class template, which provides the same functionality as floatx, but allows changing the precision of the type at runtime. This class is easier to experiment with, but is not as efficient as floatx in both the performance, as well as the memory consumption. (flexfloat - provides a type that has a comparable memory consumption with the precision selectable at runtime in the C library only)
• conversions between builtin types and floatx (flexfloat - had a bug where NaN can be cast to Inf during conversion)
• assignments on floatx and floatxr types (flexfloat)
• relational operations on floatx and floatxr types (flexfloat - did not handle NaN properly)
• relational operations between different types
• arithmetic operations on floatx and floatxr types (flexfloat)
• arithmetic operations between different types with implicit type promotion
• std::ostream& operator <<(std::ostream&, floatx[r]) (flexfloat)
• std::istream& operator >>(std::istream&, floatx[r])
• CUDA support

What FloatX is NOT

FloatX does not implement arbitrary floating point types. The only supported types are "subtypes" of those natively supported by the hardware. In case you need implementations of larger types, consider using the SoftFloat library.

FloatX emulates the types of custom precision, subject to the constraints above, and, while trying to achieve as high performance as possible, it is not capable of magically delivering better performance than natively supported types. Thus, do not expect floatx<3, 3> to consume less memory, or be faster than e.g. float, though floatx<11, 52> should deliver similar performance as double.

That being said, it is not likely that FloatX will be useful in production codes. On the other hand, it can be handy in research projects which aim to study the effects of using different precisions.

Installation

To use the library, just make sure that a directory containing floatx.hpp is in your include path (here, it is in src/ subdirectory).

Alternatively, if you are using CMake, a CMakeLists.txt file is provided. You can download the repository into your project and use the following code to depend on the floatx target:

add_subdirectory(floatx)
target_add_library(my_target PRIVATE floatx)

Building the examples / unit tests

A standard CMake command line sequence should do:

mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make

To run all the tests:

make test

This will (hopefully) output a summary of the form:

test_<testname>............ Passed

To run only one of the tests (and see more detail output):

./test/<testname>

Examples

Some sample code using floatx:

1:  flx::floatx<7, 12> a = 1.2; // 7 exponent bits , 12 sign . bits
2:  flx::floatx<7, 12> b = 3; // 7 exponent bits , 12 sign . bits
3:  flx::floatx<10, 9> c; // 10 exponent bits , 9 sign . bits
4:  float d = 3.2;
5:  double e = 5.2;
6:
7:  std :: cin >> c;
8:  c = a + b; // decltype (a + b) == floatx <7, 12>
9:  bool t = a < b;
10:  a += c;
11:  d = a / c; // decltype (a / c) == floatx <10 , 12>
12:  e = c - d; // decltype (c - d) == floatx <10 , 23>
13:  c = a * e; // decltype (a * e) == floatx <11 , 52>
14:  std :: cout << c;

Lines 1, 2, and 3 show how floatx numbers can be constructed from built-in types (floating-point numbers and integers) and read from C++ streams. Lines 8 and 9 show how these objects are used to perform basic arithmetic and relational operations. Lines 10-13 demonstrate the interoperability between different floatx and built-in types. The comments on the right specify the return type of the operation. Note, that T == U, where T and U are types, is used to convey that these two types are the same, i.e., that std::is_same<T, U>::value evaluates to true. Lines 8 and 11-13 also show that floatx types can be implicitly converted to other floatx types or built-in types. Finally, line 14 shows how floatx types can be written to an output stream.

Authors and contacts

• Goran Flegar, Departamento de Ingeniería y Ciencia de Computadores, Universidad Jaime I, Spain, [email protected]
• Florian Scheidegger, IBM Research - Zurich, [email protected]
• Vedran Novakovic, Departamento de Ingeniería y Ciencia de Computadores, Universidad Jaime I, Spain
• Giovani Mariani, IBM Research - Zurich,
• Andres E. Tomas, Departamento de Ingeniería y Ciencia de Computadores, Universidad Jaime I, Spain,[email protected]
• A. Cristiano I. Malossi, IBM Research - Zurich, [email protected]
• Enrique S. Quintana-Orti, Departamento de Informática de Sistemas y Computadores,Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain, [email protected]

Reference

The full text of our paper explaining floatx in datail is available under the following link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3368086?download=true.

Please, if you like and use our work, cite our paper as follows:

@article{flegar2019floatx,
author={Flegar, Goran and Scheidegger, Florian and Novakovi{\'c}, Vedran and Mariani, Giovani and Tom{\'{}} s, Andr{\'e}s E and Malossi, A Cristiano I and Quintana-Ort{\'\i}, Enrique S},
 title = {FloatX: A C++ Library for Customized Floating-Point Arithmetic},
 year = {2019},
 issue_date = {December 2019},
 publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 volume = {45},
 number = {4},
 issn = {0098-3500},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3368086},
 doi = {10.1145/3368086},
 journal={ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS)},
 month = dec,
 articleno = {Article 40},
 numpages = {23},
}

Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the European Union’s H2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 732631, project OPRECOMP.

For details visit http://oprecomp.eu/.