What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About?

As such, computer scientists should be aware of how kernels handle system calls, paging, scheduling, context-switching, filesystems and internal resource management. A good understanding of operating systems is secondary only to an understanding of compilers and architecture for achieving performance.

Why do we need floating-point arithmetic?

A floating-point system can be used to represent, with a fixed number of digits, numbers of different orders of magnitude: e.g. the distance between galaxies or the diameter of an atomic nucleus can be expressed with the same unit of length.

What is floating-point arithmetic and why do computers employ it?

Floating point numbers are used to represent noninteger fractional numbers and are used in most engineering and technical calculations, for example, 3.256, 2.1, and 0.0036. According to this standard, floating point numbers are represented with 32 bits (single precision) or 64 bits (double precision).

What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic?

In 1991 David Goldberg at Xerox PARC published the seminal paper on floating point arithmetic titled “What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic.” This paper was especially influential in the 1990’s and early 2000’s when limitations in computer hardware drove people to operate in a regime that most exposes them to the limitations of floating point arithmetic, specifically using 32 bit floats for storing and calculating floating point numbers.

What are floating point numbers?

As the name implies, floating point numbers are numbers that contain floating decimal points. For example, the numbers 5.5, 0.001, and -2,345.6789 are floating point numbers. Numbers that do not have decimal places are called integers. Computers recognize real numbers that contain fractions as floating point numbers.

What is floating point format?

Single-precision floating-point format. Single-precision floating-point format is a computer number format, usually occupying 32 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point.

What does floating point mean?

“Floating point” means the decimal point can move, or “float” in the number. This is in contrast to “fixed point” where the decimal remains in a single, “fixed” location. If I want to represent how much money is in my pocket, I know there will be two decimal places.