high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Up until the late eighties, each computer vendor was left to develop their own conventions for floating-point computation as they saw fit. As a result, programmers needed to familiarize themselves with the peculiarities of each system in order to write effective software and evaluate numerical error. In 1987, a standard was established for floating-point computation to alleviate this problem, and CPU vendors now design to this standard [IEEE 1987].