Computing Correctly Rounded Integer Powers in Floating-Point Arithmetic
Résumé
We introduce several algorithms for accurately evaluating powers to a positive integer in floating-point arithmetic, assuming a fused multiply-add (fma) instruction is available. For bounded, yet very large values of the exponent, we aim at obtaining correctly-rounded results in round-to-nearest mode, that is, our algorithms return the floating-point number that is nearest the exact value.