Perils of floating point arithmetic

A recent discussion on stackoverflow brought up the issue of results of floating point arithmetic being non-reproducible

A reader asked what one could do to guarantee that result of floating point computation is always the same, and Daniel Lichtblau, a veteran developer at the kernel group of WRI replied that "it is impossible with current hardware and software"

One problem is that IEEE 754 standard is ambiguous, and different implementations of it give slightly different results. See page 250 of What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Arithmetic for specific examples. This means that compiling code on a different system can produce slightly different results.

Another issue is that even when you run the same computation on the same system, results can be slightly different on reruns. This has to do with how low-level optimization is scheduled.

This means that if you want your results to be reproducible, you should avoid things like testing floating point numbers for equality. John D Cook gives some more advice in Five Tips for Floating Point Programming