alt Hacker NewsI’d be surprised if it were a lot. At that time (open to corrections) not a lot of scientific research was done on consumer intel platforms.
Obviously it was found by a mathematician, but I still suspect it wasn’t obvious in published research or that it ended up not causing significant enough deviations to cause research to revisit the calculations.
My team ran into some interesting but very small deviations when we moved our iterative solar wind model from 32 bit to 64 bit, but the changes weren’t significant enough to revisit or re-do prior research wholesale.
Like my team in the 2000s I suspect anyone who had data crunched by this bug also revisited it and either concluded it wasn’t significant enough or redid the work and it didn’t change the conclusions.
I am curious now if this bug was cited in any papers at the time to give a rough idea how aware or affected academics were.
At that time (open to corrections) not a lot of scientific research was done on consumer intel platforms.
We had researchers doing what I suppose might be called HPC on Sequent Symmetrys, which were i386s in the mid-80s and Pentiums by the mid-90s. There were other high-performance x86 SMP boxes that were roughly equivalent (e.g. NCR 3550). That plus some pretty good x86 FORTRAN compilers (e.g. Lehey (sp?)) made this reasonable. I also know a lot of folks who had desktop/side SMP PPros + FORTRAN to save grant money on the big iron and got useful work out of them.
Basically, x86 was way cheap and had useful amounts of FP. There's a reason x86 displaced risc; this is one. I'm sure they would have rather used something like an X/MP-48, but one plays the hand one is delt.