Ensuring correctness in high-performance computing (HPC) applications is one of the fundamental challenges that the HPC community faces today. While significant advances in verification, testing, and debugging have been made to isolate software errors (or defects) in the context of non-HPC software, several factors make achieving correctness in HPC applications and systems much more challenging than in general systems software—growing heterogeneity (architectures with CPUs, GPUs, and special purpose accelerators), massive scale computations (very high degree of concurrency), use of combined parallel programing models (e.g., MPI+X), new scalable numerical algorithms (e.g., to leverage reduced precision in floating-point arithmetic), and aggressive compiler optimizations/transformations are some of the challenges that make correctness harder in HPC. The following report lays out the key challenges and research areas of HPC correctness: DOE Report of the HPC Correctness Summit.

As the complexity of future architectures, algorithms, and applications in HPC increases, the ability to fully exploit exascale systems will be limited without correctness. With the continuous use of HPC software to advance scientific and technological capabilities, novel techniques and practical tools for software correctness in HPC are invaluable.

The goal of the Correctness Workshop is to bring together researchers and developers to present and discuss novel ideas to address the problem of correctness in HPC. The workshop will feature contributed papers and invited talks in this area.