Online Alignment and Addition in Multi-Term Floating-Point Adders

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Alexandridis, Kosmas, Dimitrakopoulos, Giorgos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Alexandridis, Kosmas
Dimitrakopoulos, Giorgos
author_facet Alexandridis, Kosmas
Dimitrakopoulos, Giorgos
contents Multi-term floating-point addition appears in vector dot-product computations, matrix multiplications, and other forms of floating-point data aggregation. A critical step in multi-term floating point addition is the alignment of fractions of the floating-point terms before adding them. Alignment is executed serially by identifying first the maximum of all exponents and then shifting the fraction of each term according to the difference of its exponent from the maximum one. Contrary to common practice, this work proposes a new online algorithm that splits the identification of the maximum exponent, the alignment shift for each fraction, and their addition to multiple fused incremental steps that can be computed in parallel. Each fused step is implemented by a new associative operator that allows the incremental alignment and addition for arbitrary number of operands. Experimental results show that employing the proposed align-and-add operators for the implementation of multi-term floating point adders can improve delay or save significant area and power. The achieved area and power savings range between 3%-23% and 4%-26%, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_21959
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Online Alignment and Addition in Multi-Term Floating-Point Adders
Alexandridis, Kosmas
Dimitrakopoulos, Giorgos
Hardware Architecture
Multi-term floating-point addition appears in vector dot-product computations, matrix multiplications, and other forms of floating-point data aggregation. A critical step in multi-term floating point addition is the alignment of fractions of the floating-point terms before adding them. Alignment is executed serially by identifying first the maximum of all exponents and then shifting the fraction of each term according to the difference of its exponent from the maximum one. Contrary to common practice, this work proposes a new online algorithm that splits the identification of the maximum exponent, the alignment shift for each fraction, and their addition to multiple fused incremental steps that can be computed in parallel. Each fused step is implemented by a new associative operator that allows the incremental alignment and addition for arbitrary number of operands. Experimental results show that employing the proposed align-and-add operators for the implementation of multi-term floating point adders can improve delay or save significant area and power. The achieved area and power savings range between 3%-23% and 4%-26%, respectively.
title Online Alignment and Addition in Multi-Term Floating-Point Adders
topic Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21959