Algorithm

From HPCBugBase

Contents 1 Defect Type Description 2 Entries 3 Advice 4 Symptom 5 Other Findings and Contexts

[edit] Defect Type Description

This defect type is intended to cover defects that exist in the application logic. Many HPC applications design and implement some scientific algorithm to produce a solution to a particular problem. The code is considered to contain defects if it does not implement the algorithm correctly, or the algorithm itself is incorrect.

There are numerical issues that are unimportant at the scale at things that people do at one processor that are important at the scale of things at HPC.

According to our past study, HPC developers feel they often spend considerable time to debug defects of this type. However, we have not established appropriate sub-types to classify this defect type. Since algorithmic defects tend to be specific to each HPC project, further study is necessary to identify defect patterns that cover a wide range of applications.

[edit] Entries

[edit] Advice

[edit] Symptom

[edit] Other Findings and Contexts

It is often the primary goal of the HPC project to develop a good algorithm itself. Computational scientists iteratively evolve the algorithm based on the output of the run. They consider this process as science itself, rather than debugging. While these two indeed seem different, it is not clear how to distinguish them in real data.