No Arabic abstract
In computational geometry, the construction of essential primitives like convex hulls, Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations require the evaluation of the signs of determinants, which are sums of products. The same signs are needed for the exact solution of linear programming problems and systems of linear inequalities. Computing these signs exactly with inexact floating point arithmetic is challenging, and we present yet another algorithm for this task. Our algorithm is efficient and uses only of floating point arithmetic, which is much faster than exact arithmetic. We prove that the algorithm is correct and provide efficient and tested C++ code for it.
If the non-zero finite floating-point numbers are interpreted as point intervals, then the effect of rounding can be interpreted as computing one of the bounds of the result according to interval arithmetic. We give an interval interpretation for the signed zeros and infinities, so that the undefined operations 0*inf, inf - inf, inf/inf, and 0/0 become defined. In this way no operation remains that gives rise to an error condition. Mathematically questionable features of the floating-point standard become well-defined sets of reals. Interval semantics provides a basis for the verification of numerical algorithms. We derive the results of the newly defined operations and consider the implications for hardware implementation.
Secure multiparty computations enable the distribution of so-called shares of sensitive data to multiple parties such that the multiple parties can effectively process the data while being unable to glean much information about the data (at least not without collusion among all parties to put back together all the shares). Thus, the parties may conspire to send all their processed results to a trusted third party (perhaps the data provider) at the conclusion of the computations, with only the trusted third party being able to view the final results. Secure multiparty computations for privacy-preserving machine-learning turn out to be possible using solely standard floating-point arithmetic, at least with a carefully controlled leakage of information less than the loss of accuracy due to roundoff, all backed by rigorous mathematical proofs of worst-case bounds on information loss and numerical stability in finite-precision arithmetic. Numerical examples illustrate the high performance attained on commodity off-the-shelf hardware for generalized linear models, including ordinary linear least-squares regression, binary and multinomial logistic regression, probit regression, and Poisson regression.
Neuromorphic computing describes the use of VLSI systems to mimic neuro-biological architectures and is also looked at as a promising alternative to the traditional von Neumann architecture. Any new computing architecture would need a system that can perform floating-point arithmetic. In this paper, we describe a neuromorphic system that performs IEEE 754-compliant floating-point multiplication. The complex process of multiplication is divided into smaller sub-tasks performed by components Exponent Adder, Bias Subtractor, Mantissa Multiplier and Sign OF/UF. We study the effect of the number of neurons per bit on accuracy and bit error rate, and estimate the optimal number of neurons needed for each component.
In-network computation has been widely used to accelerate data-intensive distributed applications. Some computational tasks, traditional performed on servers, are offloaded to the network (i.e. programmable switches). However, the computational capacity of programmable switches is limited to simple integer arithmetic operations while many of applications require on-the-fly floating-point operations. To address this issue, prior approaches either adopt a float-to-integer method or directly offload computational tasks to the local CPUs of switches, incurring accuracy loss and delayed processing. To this end, we propose NetFC, a table-lookup method to achieve on-the-fly in-network floating-point arithmetic operations nearly without accuracy loss. NetFC adopts a divide-and-conquer mechanism that converts the original huge table into several much small tables together with some integer operations. NetFC adopts a scaling-factor mechanism for computational accuracy improvement, and a prefix-based lossless table compression method to reduce the memory overhead. We use different types of datasets to evaluate NetFC. The experimental results show that the average accuracy of NetFC can be as high as up to 99.94% at worst with only 448KB memory consumption. Furthermore, we integrate NetFC into Sonata for detecting Slowloris attack, yielding significant decrease of detection delay.
We give an overview of the 2020 Computational Geometry Challenge, which targeted the problem of partitioning the convex hull of a given planar point set P into the smallest number of convex faces, such that no point of P is contained in the interior of a face.