| praveen |
February 21, 2010 06:57 |
Errors in scientific codes
I would like to point to a recent slashdot post
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10...To-Be-Released
Quote:
For example Professor Les Hatton, an international expert in software testing resident in the Universities of Kent and Kingston, carried out an extensive analysis of several million lines of scientific code. He showed that the software had an unacceptably high level of detectable inconsistencies. For example, interface inconsistencies between software modules which pass data from one part of a program to another occurred at the rate of one in every seven interfaces on average in the programming language Fortran, and one in every 37 interfaces in the language C. This is hugely worrying when you realise that just one error — just one — will usually invalidate a computer program. What he also discovered, even more worryingly, is that the accuracy of results declined from six significant figures to one significant figure during the running of programs
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This paints a very gloomy picture. But personally I dont seem to have suffered due to this kind of errors in my work. Nor have I heard complaints from my friends who do scientific computing.
What is your experience regarding the type of errors discussed in the article when it comes to CFD codes.
The article by Prof. Hatton is here
http://www.leshatton.org/Documents/Texp_ICSE297.pdf |
