Announcing a 2-day course - FP Arithmetic'97

[Prof. Israel Koren]

Dear Colleague,

Professor W. Kahan from UC Berkeley and I plan to offer a two-day 
short course entitled:

 GENERAL-PURPOSE FLOATING-POINT SYSTEMS - HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE ISSUES

on Monday June 30 and Tuesday July 1, 1997 in Mountain View, California.

This is an updated and modified course based on the feedback we received
last time we offered such a course in January 1996. Attached below 
are some of the attendees' comments on the January 1996 course.

This short course will cover:

* The IEEE Floating-point standard
* Floating-point units - design principles (operations to be implemented
  in hardware, common algorithms for their implementations, pipelining,
  rounding, coping with special cases like gradual underflow)
* Floating-point exceptions - why they should not be handled by the
  OS, how to live with imprecise interrupts, linguistic inconveniences
* Compiler issues - the three predominant instruction sets, historical
  blunders, exploiting the instruction sets' advantages, code
  portability.
* Libraries of elementary functions
* Testing floating-point hardware and libraries

We would like to know whether there is an interest in your company in 
this course and a rough estimate of the number of people who may want
to attend it. Attendance is limited and registrations will be
accepted on a first come first served basis. The registration fee
is $495/person ($425/person for 5 or more from the same company)
for early registration (prior to June 17, 1997).

Sincerely,
Israel Koren
Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003
Tel: (413)545-2643
FAX: (413)545-1993
E-Mail: korenaeuler.ecs.umass.edu 

Web home pages: http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/koren/arith
                http://http.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/

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Some attendees' comments on the 2-day course offered in January 1996:

"The class was excellent. The switching back and forth between
Dr. Kahan and Dr. Koren was an excellent approach !"

"Most of these (course topics) were very interesting to me, and I found
the course to be very useful.  I am now working on applying some of the
math testing techniques to our products."

"I enjoyed the course very much.  Thanks very much for putting it on.
See you again next year."

"Overall, the conference was excellent. I found the material interesting
and useful."

"I enjoyed the class!  A lot of important topics were covered very well,
even with the limited time available."

"In general, the class was very beneficial for me as a numerical
analyst trying to pick up some computer arithmetic. Many of the classes
were quite informative, but even those where I was largely lost were
helpful in giving me a handle on jargon and the jist of things.
Thanks very much."