A dynamic program analysis to find floating-point accuracy problems

Programs using floating-point arithmetic are prone to accuracy problems caused by rounding and catastrophic cancellation. These phenomena provoke bugs that are notoriously hard to track down: the program does not necessarily crash and the results are not necessarily obviously wrong, but often subtly inaccurate. Further use of these values can lead to catastrophic errors.In this paper, we present a dynamic program analysis that supports the programmer in finding accuracy problems. Our analysis uses binary translation to perform every floating-point computation side by side in higher precision. Furthermore, we use a lightweight slicing approach to track the evolution of errors.We evaluate our…