An Overview of Numalis Software Suite for Reliable Numerical Computation

摘要

Numerical algorithms are used in many areas but they rely on approximate computations due to the finite precision computer arithmetic. As critical systems perform more and more calculations, needs for verification and validation techniques and for assisted development increase, the computer arithmetics being particularly not intuitive. It is then necessary to provide tools to the programmers, to help them to validate and increase the numerical quality of their codes and, broadly, to develop more fastly more reliable numerical codes. In this article, we give a description of the main problems concerning numerical accuracy encountered in industry at the software engineering level and we give an overview of the solutions proposed by the software suite developed by the Numalis Company. This suite contains tools for verification and validation by static and dynamic analysis as well as assisted development tools. The latter tools optimize programs in order to make them compute more accurate results and they also infer the least formats, in terms of bit size, in order to fulfill accuracy requirements.