Intel® Decimal Floating-Point Math Library

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Software implementation of the IEEE 754R Decimal Floating-Point Arithmetic specification aimed at financial applications, especially in cases where legal requirements make it necessary to use decimal, and not binary floating-point arithmetic (as computation performed with binary floating-point operations may introduce small, but unacceptable errors).

Ensures compliance with the upcoming revision of the IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic.  The library implements the functions defined for decimal floating-point arithmetic operations in the 'DRAFT Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic P754', which is a revision of the IEEE Standard 754-1985 for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic. There is no IEEE publication of the revised standard draft at the present time, but on-line resources such as Wikipedia (search for 'IEEE 754r') offer ample information and links to relevant sites. The Intel(R) Decimal Floating-Point Math Library supports primarily the binary encoding format for decimal floating-point values, but the decimal encoding format is supported too in the library, by means of conversion functions(*) between the two encoding formats.

Release 1.0 of the library contained in this package implements all the operations mandated by the 'DRAFT Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic P754'.  For operations involving integer operands or results, the library supports signed and unsigned 8-, 16-, 32-, and 64-bit integers.

The library package contains: (1) a copy of the end user license agreement; (2) a README FILE; (3) a LIBRARY subdirectory with all the source files necessary to build the library, and a README file which specifies how to build the library in Linux**, HP-UX**, Windows***, and other operating systems; (4) a TESTS subdirectory with source and input files necessary to build and run a reduced set of tests for the library and a README file which specifies how to build and run these tests; (5) an EXAMPLES subdirectory containing eight examples of calls to library functions with various combinations of build options.

This generic package will run on any platform in Linux, Windows, HP-UX, Solaris, OSX

Marius Cornea is a principal engineer in Intel's Software & Solutions Group. He holds a master's degree in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. Since joining Intel in 1994, his work is related to scientific computation, design and development of numerical algorithms, floating-point emulation, exception handling, and new floating-point instruction definition and analysis. His e-mail is marius.cornea at intel.com.