Adaptable Assertion Checking for Scientific Software Components

We present a proposal for lowering the overhead of interface contract checking for science and engineering applications. Run-time enforcement of assertions is a well-known technique for improving the quality of software; however, the performance penalty is often too high for their retention during deployment, especially for long-running applications that depend upon iterative operations. With an efficient adaptive approach the benefits of run-time checking can continue to accrue with minimal overhead. Examples from scientific software interfaces being developed in the high performance computing research community will be used to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of this approach.

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