Title
Trusting computations: A mechanized proof from partial differential equations to actual program
Abstract
Computer programs may go wrong due to exceptional behaviors, out-of-bound array accesses, or simply coding errors. Thus, they cannot be blindly trusted. Scientific computing programs make no exception in that respect, and even bring specific accuracy issues due to their massive use of floating-point computations. Yet, it is uncommon to guarantee their correctness. Indeed, we had to extend existing methods and tools for proving the correct behavior of programs to verify an existing numerical analysis program. This C program implements the second-order centered finite difference explicit scheme for solving the 1D wave equation. In fact, we have gone much further as we have mechanically verified the convergence of the numerical scheme in order to get a complete formal proof covering all aspects from partial differential equations to actual numerical results. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such a comprehensive proof is achieved.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1016/j.camwa.2014.06.004
Computers & Mathematics with Applications
Keywords
DocType
Volume
acoustic wave equation,convergence of numerical scheme,formal proof of numerical program,rounding error analysis
Journal
68
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
0898-1221
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.59
25
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sylvie Boldo129226.85
François Clément2374.04
Jean-Christophe Filliâtre361545.86
Micaela Mayero48410.38
Guillaume Melquiond534524.82
Pierre Weis615119.20