Publications of Torsten Hoefler

Pratyai Mazumder, Alexandru Calotoiu, Marcin Copik, Yakup Koray Budanaz, Shriram Chandran, Torsten Hoefler:

What Bloats Your Floats? Right-Sizing Numerical Precision for Scientific Computing

(2026, Just Accepted )

Abstract

While FP64 (binary64) remains the standard representation of real numbers in scientific computing, hardware trends increasingly favor low-precision formats optimized for AI workloads. This shift prioritizes throughput and energy efficiency over full-precision capabilities. We challenge the necessity of high-precision arithmetic in PDE-governed simulations, where spatial and temporal discretization errors introduce a physical noise floor that masks the lower-order bits of the FP64 format, rendering them irrelevant. We propose a criterion based on the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) with respect to spatial and temporal refinements to evaluate the impact of safe precision reduction on scientific computations. Finally, we present an automated dataflow-centric workflow for targeted lowering within mixed-precision subgraphs in complex scientific applications. Large-scale evaluations of weather and climate applications show that strategic precision reduction on GPUs achieves up to 1.8× speedup without compromising physical fidelity.

Documents

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BibTeX

@article{pratyai2026floats,
  author={Pratyai Mazumder and Alexandru Calotoiu and Marcin Copik and Yakup Koray Budanaz and Shriram Chandran and Torsten Hoefler},
  title={{What Bloats Your Floats? Right-Sizing Numerical Precision for Scientific Computing}},
  institution={ETH Zurich},
  year={2026},
  note={Just Accepted},
  source={http://www.unixer.de/~htor/publications/},
}


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