3 research outputs found
A non-local method for robustness analysis of floating point programs
Robustness is a standard correctness property which intuitively means that if
the input to the program changes less than a fixed small amount then the output
changes only slightly. This notion is useful in the analysis of rounding error
for floating point programs because it helps to establish bounds on output
errors introduced by both measurement errors and by floating point computation.
Compositional methods often do not work since key constructs---like the
conditional and the while-loop---are not robust. We propose a method for
proving the robustness of a while-loop. This method is non-local in the sense
that instead of breaking the analysis down to single lines of code, it checks
certain global properties of its structure. We show the applicability of our
method on two standard algorithms: the CORDIC computation of the cosine and
Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm.Comment: QAPL - Tenth Workshop on Quantitative Aspects of Programming
Languages (2012