Emulate "double" using 2 "float"s

double-float is a technique that uses pairs of single-precision numbers to achieve almost twice the precision of single precision arithmetic accompanied by a slight reduction of the single precision exponent range (due to intermediate underflow and overflow at the far ends of the range). The basic algorithms were developed by T.J. Dekker and William Kahan in the 1970s. Below I list two fairly recent papers that show how these techniques can be adapted to GPUs, however much of the material covered in these papers is applicable independent of platform so should be useful for the task at hand.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00021443 Guillaume Da Graça, David Defour Implementation of float-float operators on graphics hardware, 7th conference on Real Numbers and Computers, RNC7.

http://andrewthall.org/papers/df64_qf128.pdf Andrew Thall Extended-Precision Floating-Point Numbers for GPU Computation.

This is not going to be simple.

A float (IEEE 754 single-precision) has 1 sign bit, 8 exponent bits, and 23 bits of mantissa (well, effectively 24).

A double (IEEE 754 double-precision) has 1 sign bit, 11 exponent bits, and 52 bits of mantissa (effectively 53).

You can use the sign bit and 8 exponent bits from one of your floats, but how are you going to get 3 more exponent bits and 29 bits of mantissa out of the other?

Maybe somebody else can come up with something clever, but my answer is "this is impossible". (Or at least, "no easier than using a 64-bit struct and implementing your own operations")

It depends a bit on what types of operations you want to perform. If you only care about additions and subtractions, Kahan Summation can be a great solution.