Maintaining Correctness in Scientific Programs

  • Authors:
  • Paul F. Dubois

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • Computing in Science and Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Change dominates scientific programming. Specifically, the difficulties that arise in scientific programming are primarily caused by the program's rapid and continual rate of change. In this article, I'll describe the layered approach that I've found to be the most successful in maintaining correctness in the face of rapid change. This approach is based on lots of existing ideas and literature; it proved so successful for the Kull computer science team's day-to-day work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, that LLNL's physics staff has also embraced it and helped expand it. I believe you'll find this to be a practical program for improving correctness in your own programs.