Floating Point Number
From Unofficial BOINC Wiki
[edit] General
This is a way to represent numbers using something like the scientific notation we fooled around with in our days in math class. A number in scientific notation is something like 3.78E+3 which is another way to say 3,780 and no cents. Floating Point Numbers are used in almost all mathematical and scientific computing projects and therefore it is of significant interest to us, the lowly participants, to have the most efficient processing of these numbers as possible. We don't have to understand them, we just need to process them fast!
Numbers in scientific notation, and in floating point, have a mantissa and an exponent. And I am way past where you stopped caring … So I will stop here …
