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MATLAB Simulator of Level-Index Arithmetic

Mathematical Software 2024-04-29 v2 Hardware Architecture Numerical Analysis Numerical Analysis

Abstract

Level-index arithmetic appeared in the 1980s. One of its principal purposes is to abolish the issues caused by underflows and overflows in floating point. However, level-index arithmetic does not expand the set of numbers but spaces out the numbers of large magnitude even more than floating-point representations to move the infinities further away from zero: gaps between numbers on both ends of the range become very large. We revisit level index by presenting a custom precision simulator in MATLAB. This toolbox is useful for exploring performance of level-index arithmetic in research projects, such as using 8-bit and 16-bit representations in machine learning algorithms where narrow bit-width is desired but overflow/underflow of floating-point representations causes difficulties.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2402.02301,
  title  = {MATLAB Simulator of Level-Index Arithmetic},
  author = {Mantas Mikaitis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.02301},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:37:27.331Z