Certifying Computational Results

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9804076 Result checking of computations is investigated using a certification-trail technique. Certification trails offer an effective and efficient alternative to result checking approaches employing replication or N-version programming. Certification- trail techniques are designed to support a secondary computation of a result by using the same input together with a special output, the certification trail, utilized by the primary computation. By making use of the certification trail, the cost of the check can be substantially less than that of the primary computation. This research extends the certification trail technique to new application domains, including important computationally intensive problems for which best known solutions generally require extensive computing time and commonly used systems programming operations. The research also develops a distributed applet-based certifiable processing technique which distributes computational problems to clients across a network and then certifies the correctness of the accumulated solution efficiently using certification trails. Finally, by using properties of computations and solutions, certification-trail techniques are developed to support result checking with predetermined degrees of correctness rather than total precision. An important goal to assure a significant impact of this research is to establish a WWW library of certification-trail techniques and solutions for general use by researchers and software developers.***