0000000000802095
AUTHOR
Sebastian Hack
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…
AnySeq: A High Performance Sequence Alignment Library based on Partial Evaluation
Sequence alignments are fundamental to bioinformatics which has resulted in a variety of optimized implementations. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them are hand-tuned and specific to certain architectures and execution models. This not only makes them challenging to understand and extend, but also difficult to port to other platforms. We present AnySeq - a novel library for computing different types of pairwise alignments of DNA sequences. Our approach combines high performance with an intuitively understandable implementation, which is achieved through the concept of partial evaluation. Using the AnyDSL compiler framework, AnySeq enables the compilation of algorithmic variants that ar…
AnyDSL: a partial evaluation framework for programming high-performance libraries
This paper advocates programming high-performance code using partial evaluation. We present a clean-slate programming system with a simple, annotation-based, online partial evaluator that operates on a CPS-style intermediate representation. Our system exposes code generation for accelerators (vectorization/parallelization for CPUs and GPUs) via compiler-known higher-order functions that can be subjected to partial evaluation. This way, generic implementations can be instantiated with target-specific code at compile time. In our experimental evaluation we present three extensive case studies from image processing, ray tracing, and genome sequence alignment. We demonstrate that using partial …