Residue number system

A residue number system or residue numeral system (RNS) is a numeral system representing integers by their values modulo several pairwise coprime integers called the moduli. This representation is allowed by the Chinese remainder theorem, which asserts that, if is the product of the moduli, there is, in an interval of length , exactly one integer having any given set of modular values.

Using a residue numeral system for arithmetic operations is also called multi-modular arithmetic.

Multi-modular arithmetic is widely used for computation with large integers, typically in linear algebra, because it provides faster computation than with the usual numeral systems, even when the time for converting between numeral systems is taken into account. Other applications of multi-modular arithmetic include polynomial greatest common divisor, Gröbner basis computation and cryptography.

Definition

A residue numeral system is defined by a set of integers

:<math>\{ m_1, m_2, m_3,\ldots, m_k\},</math>

called the moduli, which are generally supposed to be pairwise coprime (that is, any two of them have a greatest common divisor equal to one). Residue number systems have been defined for non-coprime moduli, but are not commonly used because of worse properties.

Arithmetic operations

For adding, subtracting and multiplying numbers represented in a residue number system, it suffices to perform the same modular operation on each pair of residues. More precisely, if

:<math>[m_1, \ldots, m_k]</math>

is the list of moduli, the sum of the integers and , respectively represented by the residues <math>[x_1,\ldots, x_k]</math> and <math>[y_1,\ldots, y_k],</math> is the integer represented by <math>[z_1,\ldots, z_k],</math> such that

:<math>z_i= (x_i+y_i)\operatorname{mod} m_i,</math>

for (as usual, mod denotes the modulo operation consisting of taking the remainder of the Euclidean division by the right operand). Subtraction and multiplication are defined similarly.

For a succession of operations, it is not necessary to apply the modulo operation at each step. It may be applied at the end of the computation, or, during the computation, for avoiding overflow of hardware operations.

However, operations such as magnitude comparison, sign computation, overflow detection, scaling, and division are difficult to perform in a residue number system.

Definition

Arithmetic operations

Further reading