GrammaTech Awarded NASA Contract for Advanced Automatic Differentiation

Ithaca, NY — GrammaTech, Inc. announced today that it has been awarded a $69,941 Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I contract by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Upon completion of this six-month contract, GrammaTech will be eligible to compete for up to $600,000 in Phase II SBIR funding. Under terms of the agreement, GrammaTech will develop advanced techniques for automatic differentiation.

Differentiation is the single most important numerical operation in scientific computing. Creating derivative functions manually or by using finite differencing is error-prone, time-consuming and potentially inaccurate. Automatic differentiation (AD) holds great promise for overcoming these problems, but it has not caught on beyond a handful of research laboratories because the naïve approaches used are inefficient. Sophisticated static analysis of source code is required to overcome these inefficiencies. GrammaTech will develop a system for AD that will use the GrammaTech’s CodeSurfer^® dependence-graph technology to provide exactly the right kinds of analysis needed to help create efficient derivatives.