Floating-point shadow value analysis
Michael O. Lam, Barry Rountree · 2016
Real-valued arithmetic has a fundamental impact on the performance and accuracy of scientific computation. As scientific application developers prepare their applications for exascale computing, many are investigating the possibility of using either lower precision (for better performance) or higher precision (for more accuracy). However, exploring alternative representations often requires significant code revision. We present a novel program analysis technique that emulates execution with alternative real number implementations at the binary level. We also present a Pin-based implementation of this technique that supports x86_64 programs and a variety of alternative representations.