مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد نرم افزار Numalis برای محاسبات عددی – IEEE 2017

Numerical algorithms are used in many areas ranging from scientific computing to digital processing in embedded systems. All these computations necessarily have a limited accuracy and the needs for verification and validation techniques increase as quickly as critical tasks relying on complex computations are delegated to computers, for example in cars, aircrafts or space vehicles. In addition to verification and validation concerns, assisted methods of conception are strongly desired since it is extremely difficult to understand the reasons why the implementation of a formula is numerically inaccurate and how to improve it. This is because the computer arithmetics, mainly the fixedpoint [15] and floating-point arithmetics [2], are particularly not intuitive. It is then necessary to provide tools to the programmers, to help them to validate and increase the numerical quality of their codes and, broadly, to develop more fastly more reliable numerical codes. Numalis is a company specialized in numerical accuracy. Numalis software suite aims at bringing solutions to the problems mentionned earlier, for V&V and assisted development of numerical algorithms. Numalis activity is mainly focused on critical embedded systems in defense, aeronautic and space, automotive but also in other economic activities such as finance or geophysics. In this article, we give a return of experience concerning the needs, at software engineering level, of our consumers for the development of numerical code and we introduce Numalis software suite. This suite contains tools for static analysis by abstract interpretation and dynamic analysis based on statistical estimation of the test datasets. It also contains tools for optimizing the accuracy of programs and for mixed-precision format tuning. This suite bring partial answers to the challenges raised by our industrial partners. This article is organized as follows. Section II gives a brief description of the fixed-point and floating-point arithmetics. Section III introduces the main challenges in the domain at software engineering level and Section IV gives an overview of Numalis Software Suite. Section V concludes.