Title: Finding Root Causes of Floating Point Error with Herbgrind,
Abstract: Floating-point arithmetic plays a central role in science, engineering, and
finance by enabling developers to approximate real arithmetic. To address
numerical issues in large floating-point applications, developers must identify
root causes, which is difficult because floating-point errors are generally
non-local, non-compositional, and non-uniform.
This paper presents Herbgrind, a tool to help developers identify and address
root causes in numerical code written in low-level C/C++ and Fortran. Herbgrind
dynamically tracks dependencies between operations and program outputs to avoid
false positives and abstracts erroneous computations to a simplified program
fragment whose improvement can reduce output error. We perform several case
studies applying Herbgrind to large, expert-crafted numerical programs and show
that it scales to applications spanning hundreds of thousands of lines,
correctly handling the low-level details of modern floating point hardware and
mathematical libraries, and tracking error across function boundaries and
through the heap.