Improving scientific software component quality through assertions

Abstract

We are proposing research on self-adaptive interface assertion enforcement for the purposes of improving scientific software component quality. Demonstrating software correctness through assertions is a well-known technique for quality improvement. However, the performance penalty is often considered too high for deployment. In order to determine if partial enforcement based on adaptive sampling is a viable solution in performance critical environments, we are pursuing research on mechanisms combining static and dynamic analyses to efficiently maximize assertion checking within performance constraints. This paper gives an overview of our initial experiments, current work, and plans.

High-performance language interoperability for scientific computing through Babel

“…Support for a variety of enforcement options across programming languages also requires option management. Finally, although earlier work pursued distributed enforcement decision processes (Dahlgren and Devanbu 2004, 2005), the goal of trying to better control enforcement overhead lead to the current release containing a centralized enforcement manager (Dahlgren 2007).…”

Parallel Object Contracts for High Performance Computing

“…The only general framework known to us that supports DbC targeted at HPC applications is provided by Babel [16], which addresses an important consideration in applying DbC to the HPC domain, namely, overhead. Babel supports several sampling-based enforcement policies (adaptive, random, periodic, etc.)…”

How the common component architecture advances computational science

“…Specification and dynamic enforcement of interface semantics are an important emerging approach to improving software quality. Whereas industry is doing this model-based software engineering with XML pre-processors, we are adapting SIDL to specify semantics constraints directly in interface descriptions [96,97]. This work will develop a powerful new feature for users to verify the correct use of third-party software.…”