{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/finding-root-causes-of-floating-point-error","title":"Finding Root Causes of Floating Point Error with Herbgrind","arxiv_id":"1705.10416","date":"2017-05-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Alex Sanchez-Stern","Pavel Panchekha","Sorin Lerner","Zachary Tatlock"],"abstract":"Floating-point arithmetic plays a central role in science, engineering, and finance by enabling developers to approximate real arithmetic. To address numerical issues in large floating-point applications, developers must identify root causes, which is difficult because floating-point errors are generally non-local, non-compositional, and non-uniform. This paper presents Herbgrind, a tool to help developers identify and address root causes in numerical code written in low-level C/C++ and Fortran. Herbgrind dynamically tracks dependencies between operations and program outputs to avoid false positives and abstracts erroneous computations to a simplified program fragment whose improvement can reduce output error. We perform several case studies applying Herbgrind to large, expert-crafted numerical programs and show that it scales to applications spanning hundreds of thousands of lines, correctly handling the low-level details of modern floating point hardware and mathematical libraries, and tracking error across function boundaries and through the heap.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1705.10416v4","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.10416v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"finding-root-causes-of-floating-point-error","repo_url":"https://github.com/uwplse/herbgrind","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}