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International Workshop on Numerical Software Verification

Working Conference on Verified Software: Theories, Tools, and Experiments

NSV 2020, VSTTE 2020: Software Verification pp 213–220Cite as

Towards Numerical Assistants

Trust, Measurement, Community, and Generality for the Numerical Workbench

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12549))

Abstract

The last few years have seen an explosion of work on tools that address numerical error in scientific, mathematical, and engineering software. The resulting tools can provide essential guidance to expert non-experts: scientists, mathematicians, and engineers for whom mathematical computation is essential but who may have little formal training in numerical methods. It is now time for these tools to move into practice.

Practitioners need a “numerical workbench” that not only succeeds as a research artifact but as a daily tool. We describe our experience adapting Herbie, a tool for numerical error repair, from a research prototype to a reliable workhorse for daily use. In particular, we focus on how we worked to increase user trust and use internal measurement to polish the tool. Looking more broadly, we show that community development and an investment in the generality of our tools, such as through the FPBench project, will better support users and strengthen our research community.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We recommend the reader try out the Herbie web demo, at https://herbie.uwplse.org/demo/, to see a report for themselves.

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Acknowledgements

Herbie and FPBench are the result of many years of work from stellar contributors including Alex Sanchez-Stern, Bill Zorn, David Thien, Oliver Flatt, Brett Saiki, Jason Qiu, Ian Briggs, Heiko Becker, Eva Darulova, Max Willsey, James Wilcox, and many others. This work was supported by the Applications Driving Architectures (ADA) Research Center, a JUMP Center co-sponsored by SRC and DARPA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Pavel Panchekha

  2. Paul G. Allen School, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Zachary Tatlock

Authors
  1. Pavel Panchekha
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  2. Zachary Tatlock
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Correspondence to Pavel Panchekha .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. MPI-SWS Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Maria Christakis

  2. University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Nadia Polikarpova

  3. Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Parasara Sridhar Duggirala

  4. Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Peter Schrammel

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Panchekha, P., Tatlock, Z. (2020). Towards Numerical Assistants. In: Christakis, M., Polikarpova, N., Duggirala, P.S., Schrammel, P. (eds) Software Verification. NSV VSTTE 2020 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12549. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63618-0_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63618-0_13

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