The End of Error

The 2000 edition of this long running and highly respected series, contains the best papers from the Ergonomics Society Annual Conference in 2000. The individual papers provide insight into current practice, presents new research findings, and forms an invaluable reference source.In addition to mainstream ergonomists and human factors specialists, Contemporary Ergonomics 2000 will appeal to all those who have an interest in peoples' interaction with their working and leisure environment - including designers, manufacturing and production engineers, health and safety specialists, occupational, applied and industrial psychologists and applied physiologists.

Dr. John L. Gustafson is an applied physicist and mathematician. He is a former Director at Intel Labs and former Chief Product Architect at AMD. A pioneer in high-performance computing, he introduced cluster computing in 1985 and first demonstrated scalable massively parallel performance on real applications in 1988. This became known as Gustafson's Law, for which he won the inaugural ACM Gordon Bell Prize. He is also a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's Golden Core Award. Find more details on his website.

Part 1 A New Number Format: The Unum: Overview. Building up to the unum format. The original sin of computer arithmetic. The complete unum format. Hidden scratchpads and the three layers. Information per bit. Fixed-size unum storage. Comparison operations. Add/subtract, and the unbiased rounding myth. Multiplication and division. Powers. Other important unary operations. Fused operations (single-use expressions). Trial runs: Unums face challenge calculations. Part 2 A New Way to Solve: The Ubox: The other kind of error. Avoiding interval arithmetic pitfalls. What does it mean to solve an equation? Permission to guess. Pendulums done correctly. The two-body problem (and beyond). Calculus considered evil: Discrete physics. The end of error. Glossary. For further reading. Appendices. Index.