Universal Docker Image

We regularly publish Docker images that contain the Universal number system tools, application and development examples, and test suites.

This is the quickest path to get a feel for mixed-precision algorithm development with custom number systems, and tools to understand the performance and numerical properties of your underlying hardware.

Run the Universal container

To fire up the container, run the following command from within a terminal:

> docker run --rm -it stillwater/universal:latest bash

This will start the Universal environment in a container, and open an interactive terminal that is ready to be used. The container environment offers command-line tools to inspect and interact with the different number systems and look in detail at the encodings for a particular value. In particular, the commands, longdouble, double, float, and ieee, provide inspections and comparisons for the native IEE-754 types provided by the compiler environment. The docker container is compiled with the GNU Compiler Collection, so the following are inspections of the value of pi of the g++ compiler:

Inspecting the IEEE-754 encodings of pi

A similar command exists to inspect posit encodings:

Inspecting the posit encodings of pi

Number System Test Suites

The Universal docker container provides the complete build of the environment, which includes all the regression suites for all the different number systems. You can access those by issuing the ctest command in the build directory:

Example of running the integer regression tests