Before revision: Floating-point arithmetic is the computational foundation of numerical scientific software . Compiler optimizations that affect floating-point arithmetic can have a significant impact on the integrity, reproducibility, and performance of HPC scientific applications.
After revision: Successful HPC software applications are long-lived. When ported across machines and their compilers, these applications often produce different numerical results, many of which are unacceptable. Such variability is also a concern while optimizing the code more aggressively to gain performance. Efficient tools that help locate the program units (files and functions) within which most of the variability occurs are badly needed, both to plan for code ports and to root-cause errors due to variability when they happen in the field . Compiler optimizations that affect floating-point arithmetic can have a significant impact on the integrity, reproducibility, and performance of HPC scientific applications.