1FLECKmarks Measuring Floating Point Performance using a FulL IEEE Compliant Arithmetic BenchmarK

The floating point standard IEEE 754 is widely implemented, but many of its capabilities are not well supported by software or hardware. Programming languages provide no standard method to access IEEE 754 features, and the hardware performance is uneven, some operations being several orders of magnitude slower under certain conditions. We propose language extensions to span IEEE 754, measure the current level of hardware support, and propose “FLECK, ” a new suite of benchmarks using IEEE 754 features. The measurements are made on four recent architectures and compared to the SPEfp_base95 ratings of the same systems. 2