Better is the enemy of good: Unums — An alternative to IEEE 754 floats and doubles

Floats and doubles according to the 1985 IEEE 754 standard exhibit in cases very strange behavior and are no longer compatible with today's technological constraints - especially in high performance computing, HPC. Hence Gustafson's Unums, a substitute to IEEE 754 floating point numbers, are a promising alternative because they `end up all error' and do so by taking into consideration the technological change which has taken place since the eighties of the last century. Of course these benefits do not come without cost: new floating point hardware is needed and new numerical algorithms have to be invented to make full use of the potential of Unums. As an example, a zero finding algorithm is proposed which exploits today's processors potential to execute several floating point operations in parallel.