Hartwig Anzt, Head of the Helmholtz Young Investigator Group FiNE — Fixed-Point Methods for Numerics at Exascale — and his team develop and test efficient numerical algorithms and make them available to computer science researchers in easy-to-use and sustainable software libraries. What is new is that these algorithms use different floating-point formats (multiprecision) to benefit from higher computing power and faster communication in lower floating-point formats.
In particular, the algorithms are able to compute on low-precision special function units such as tensor cores in NVIDIA's GPUs. Although there has been research in the direction of multiprecision algorithms for many years, there is no production-ready software technology.
Hartwig Anzt succeeded in making the first algorithms "exascale-capable" and his software library Gingko is now part of the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Development Kit (xSDK), which was presented at the Supercomputing Conference 2019 in Denver. In the podcast Let's talk Exascale of the American Exascale-portal exascaleproject.org Anzt talks about the Ginkgo software and the visionary research on Multiprecision Algorithms in episode 47.