This paper presents a multiple-precision binary floating-point library, written in the ISO C language, and based on the GNU MP library. Its particularity is to extend to arbitrary-precision ideas from the IEEE 754 standard, by providing correct rounding and exceptions. We demonstrate how these strong semantics are achieved — with no significant slowdown with respect to other arbitrary-precision tools — and discuss a few applications where such a library can be useful. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.3.0 [Programming Languages]: General—Standards; G.1.0 [Numerical Analysis]: General—computer arithmetic, multiple precision arithmetic; G.1.2 [Numerical Analysis]: Approximation—elementary and special function approximation; G 4 [Mathematics of Computing]: Mathematical Software—algorithm design, efficiency, portability

This article presents advances on the subject of correctly rounded elementary functions since the publication of the libultim mathematical library developed by Ziv at IBM. This library showed that the average performance and memory overhead of correct rounding could be made negligible. However, the worst-case overhead was still a factor 1000 or more. It is shown here that, with current processor technology, this worst-case overhead can be kept within a factor of 2 to 10 of current best libms. This low overhead has very positive consequences on the techniques for implementing and proving correctly rounded functions, which are also studied. These results lift the last technical obstacles to a generalisation of (at least some) correctly rounded double precision elementary functions.

c t i v it y e p o r t 2009 Table of contents

d' ctivity eport

d' ctivity eport