[Numpy-discussion] numpy and roundoff(?)

[Lisandro Dalcin]

On 3/1/08, Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
> So they differ in the least significant bit. Not surprising, I expect the
> Fortran compiler might well perform operations in different order,
> accumulate in different places, etc. It might also accumulate in higher
> precision registers or round differently depending on hardware and various
> flags.

Of course, but a completely unrelated but equivalent C implementation
of this problem, as you can check in line 313 at this link

http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-as/snapshots/petsc-current/src/snes/examples/tutorials/ex5.c.html

behaves almost the same that my F90 implemented residual. Perhaps
Fortran compiler (gfortran) will generate the same code as the C one,
but I'm not sure, Fortran compilers can be smarter that C compilers
for this kind of looping.

> The exp functions in Fortran and C might also return slightly
> different results.

I believe this is not the source of the problem, I've tried commenting
that term, and differences are still there.

> I don't think the differences are significant, but if you
> really want to compare results you will need a higher precision solution to
> compare against.

I agree, the differences are not significant, but they end up having a
noticeable impact. I'm still surprised!.

Let's stop all this now. I'll be back as soon as I can produce some
self-contained code to show and reproducing the problem.


-- 
Lisandro Dalcín
---------------
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