J. Gustafson
The Mainstreaming of Interval Arithmetic
SCAN 2000, Karlsruhe, Germany, September 2000
Interval arithmetic and validated arithmetic methods are almost
unknown in the United States, and are absent in the federally funded
High Performance Computing efforts of the last twenty years. The
focus has been on floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) to
the exclusion of any concern for the correctness of the result.
However, the treaty-mandated need to validate nuclear weapons without
physical experiments (the ASCI program) may prove to be the key to
changing this. Radiation transport provides an example where bounded
intervals can provide much more useful answers than existing point
methods, whether they are used for modeling nuclear reactions or
for computer-generated graphics. This example, and others, can be
used to illustrate a general strategy that will allow us to move
interval arithmetic into the mainstream of high-speed computing.
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