The Approximation Tower in Computational Science: Why Testing Scientific Software Is Difficult

Hinsen, Konrad

doi:10.1109/mcse.2015.75

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Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…But most of the time is not all of the time. One particular subtle point is floating-point arithmetic, which has the reputation of being fundamentally irreproducible [4]. And yet, at the level of the operations defined by the standard IEEE-754 (which all processors and compilers today respect), floatingpoint arithmetic is perfectly deterministic.…”

Section: The State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Staged Computation: The Technique You Did Not Know You Were Using

Hinsen

Turk²

2020

Comput. Sci. Eng.

Self Cite

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Section: The State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Staged Computation: The Technique You Did Not Know You Were Using

Hinsen

Turk²

2020

Comput. Sci. Eng.

Self Cite

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“…At the level of a computational platform, the only possible guarantee is bit-level replicability. Moreover, bit-level replicability is indispensable for software testing 27 .…”

Section: The Activepapers Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

ActivePapers: a platform for publishing and archiving computer-aided research

Hinsen

2015

F1000Res

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Computational models and methods take an ever more important place in modern scientific research. At the same time, they are becoming ever more complex, to the point that many such models and methods can no longer be adequately described in the narrative of a traditional journal article. Often they exist only as part of scientific software tools, which causes two important problems: (1) software tools are much more complex than the models and methods they embed, making the latter unnecessarily difficult to understand, (2) software tools depend on minute details of the computing environment they were written for, making them difficult to deploy and often completely unusable after a few years. This article addresses the second problem, based on the experience gained from the development and use of a platform specifically designed to facilitate the integration of computational methods into the scientific record.

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