New CRC Press Book Poised to Revolutionize Computational Mathematics
Boca Raton, Fla. (PRWEB) February 12, 2015 -- CRC Press is pleased to announce the publication of “The End of Error: Unum Computing,” which unveils an innovative number representation system that can solve problems that have vexed engineers and scientists for decades, including problems that have been historically limited to serial processing.
“This is a ground-breaking book about numbers, but it is not aimed at mathematicians: It is for everyone who uses computers for calculation. It describes a new way to represent numbers, a way that saves energy and power by using fewer bits of storage,” Dr. Gustafson exclaims. “Yet, it produces far more accurate and reliable results than the floating-point numbers in current use, and is less treacherous for non-experts to use.”
Written by one of the foremost experts in high-performance computing and the inventor of Gustafson’s Law, “The End of Error: Unum Computing” explains a new approach to computer arithmetic: the universal number (unum). The unum encompasses all IEEE floating-point formats as well as fixed-point and exact integer arithmetic. This new number type obtains more accurate answers than floating-point arithmetic yet uses fewer bits in many cases—saving memory, bandwidth, energy and power.
“John Gustafson presents a bold and brilliant proposal for a revolutionary number representation system, unum, for scientific (and potentially all other) computers,” explains Gordon Bell, Researcher Emeritus at Microsoft Research. “Unum’s main advantage is that computing with these numbers gives scientists the correct answer all the time. Gustafson is able to show that the universal number, or unum, encompasses all standard floating-point formats as well as fixed-point and exact integer arithmetic. The book is a call to action for the next stage: implementation and testing that would lead to wide-scale adoption.”
Dr. John L. Gustafson is an applied physicist and mathematician. He is a former Director at Intel Labs and former Chief Product Architect at AMD. A pioneer in high-performance computing, he introduced cluster computing in 1985 and first demonstrated scalable massively parallel performance on real applications in 1988. This became known as Gustafson’s Law, for which he won the inaugural ACM Gordon Bell Prize. He is also a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award.
For more information or to purchase “The End of Error: Unum Computing,” please visit: http://ow.ly/IChMQ
About CRC Press: CRC Press is a premier publisher of scientific, technology and medical resources, reaching around the globe to collect essential reference material and the latest advances and making them available to researchers, academics, professionals and students in a variety of accessible formats. CRC Press is a member of Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business. For more information, visit http://www.crcpress.com
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Chris Manion - Computer Science Marketing Manager, CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, http://www.crcpress.com, +1 800-272-7737 Ext: 14804, [email protected]
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