Description
MPFR is a portable library written in C for arbitrary precision arithmetic on floating-point numbers. It is based on the GNU MP library. It aims to provide a class of floating-point numbers with precise semantics. The main characteristics of MPFR, which make it differ from most arbitrary precision floating-point software tools, are:
- the MPFR code is portable, i.e., the result of any operation does not depend on the machine word size mp_bits_per_limb (64 on most current processors);
- the precision in bits can be set exactly to any valid value for each variable (including very small precision);
- MPFR provides the four rounding modes from the IEEE 754-1985 standard, plus away-from-zero, as well as for basic operations as for other mathematical functions.
In particular, with a precision of 53 bits, MPFR is able to exactly reproduce all computations with double-precision machine floating-point numbers (e.g., double type in C, with a C implementation that rigorously follows Annex F of the ISO C99 standard and FP_CONTRACT pragma set to OFF) on the four arithmetic operations and the square root, except the default exponent range is much wider and subnormal numbers are not implemented (but can be emulated).
Home Page
Documentation
http://www.mpfr.org/mpfr-current/mpfr.html
Usage
Use
# module avail MPFR
to see which versions of MPFR are available. Use
# module load MPFR/version
to get access to MPFR.