# 11. Half-precision floating point and stochastic rounding¶

The IPU supports IEEE half-precision floating-point numbers, and supports stochastic rounding in hardware. The IPU extensions to TensorFlow expose this floating point functionality through the functions described below. See the Python API for more details.

## 11.1. Controlling the half-precision floating-point unit¶

You can configure the floating-point behaviour of the hardware using the floating_point_behaviour category of an IPUConfig instance.

The esr bit enables the stochastic rounding unit. Three of the remaining options control the generation of hardware exceptions on various conditions. The nanoo bit selects between clipping or generating a NaN when a half-precision number overflows.

## 11.2. Resetting the global random number seed¶

The stochastic rounding unit and the TensorFlow stateful random number generators both use a common global random number seed to initialise the random number generator hardware. Each IPU device has its own seed.

By default this seed is set randomly, but it can be reset by using the function tensorflow.python.ipu.utils.reset_ipu_seed().

Due to the hardware threading in the device, if the seed reset function is used then the target.deterministicWorkers Poplar Engine option will need to be set to “portable”.

This can be done using the compilation_poplar_options option of an IPUConfig instance.

## 11.3. Debugging numerical issues¶

The values held in a tensor can be printed by calling ipu.internal_ops.print_tensor. This function takes a tensor and will print it to standard error as a side effect.