laser VS highway

It depends.

You need 2~3 accumulators to saturate instruction-level parallelism with a parallel sum reduction. But the compiler won't do it because it only creates those when the operation is associative, i.e. (a+b)+c = a+(b+c), which is true for integers but not for floats.

There is an escape hatch in -ffast-math.

I have extensive benches on this here: https://github.com/mratsim/laser/blob/master/benchmarks%2Ffp...

Ah,

It was from an older implementation that wasn't compatible with Nim v2. I've commented it out.

If you pull again it should work.

> Anyway the reason for your competitive performance is likely that you are benchmarking with very small matrices. OpenBLAS spends some time preprocessing the tiles which doesn't really pay off until they become really huge.

I don't get why you think it's impossible to reach BLAS speed. The matrix sizes are configured here: https://github.com/mratsim/laser/blob/master/benchmarks/gemm...

It defaults to 1920x1920 * 1920x1920. Note, if you activate the benchmarks versus PyTorch Glow, in the past it didn't support non-multiple of 16 or something, not sure today.

Packing is done here: https://github.com/mratsim/laser/blob/master/laser/primitive...

And it also support pre-packing which is useful to reimplement batch_matmul like what CuBLAS provides and is quite useful for convolution via matmul.

For convolutions: - https://github.com/numforge/laser/blob/e23b5d63/research/convolution_optimisation_resources.md

You can train yourself on matrix transposition first. It's straightforward to get 3x speedup between naive transposition and double loop tiling, see: https://github.com/numforge/laser/blob/d1e6ae6/benchmarks/transpose/transpose_bench.nim#L238

It's great you bring up cmp, helps to understand why 4x128 is not necessarily as good as 1x512. Quicksort, hardly a 'weird kernel', does comparisons followed by compaction. Because comparisons return a predicate, which have only a single write port, we can only do 128 bits of comparisons per cycle. Ouch.

However, masking can still help our VQSort [1], for example when writing the rightmost partition right to left without stomping on subsequent elements, or in a sorting network, only updating every second element.

[1] https://github.com/google/highway/tree/master/hwy/contrib/so...

The bf16 dot instruction replaces 6 instructions: https://github.com/google/highway/blob/master/hwy/ops/x86_12...

[0] for those interested in Highway.

It's also mentioned in [1], which starts off

> Today we're sharing open source code that can sort arrays of numbers about ten times as fast as the C++ std::sort, and outperforms state of the art architecture-specific algorithms, while being portable across all modern CPU architectures. Below we discuss how we achieved this.

[0] https://github.com/google/highway

[1] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/06/Vectorized%20and%2..., which has an associated paper at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.05982.pdf.

Thanks so much!

Everyone working on this self-selected into contributing, so I think of it less as my team than ... a team?

Specifically want to call out: Jan Wassenberg (author of https://github.com/google/highway) and I started gemma.cpp as a small project just a few months ago + Phil Culliton, Dan Zheng, and Paul Chang + of course the GDM Gemma team.

C++ users can enjoy Highway [1].

[1] https://github.com/google/highway/

At that point it is better to have some kind of DSL that should not be in the main language, because it would target a much lower level than a typical program. The best effort I've seen in this scene was Google's Highway [1] (not to be confused with HighwayHash) and I even once attempted to recreate it in Rust, but it is still distanced from my ideal.

[1] https://github.com/google/highway

Interesting, thanks for sharing :)

At the time we open-sourced Highway, the standardization process had already started and there were some discussions.

I'm curious why stdlib is the only path you see to default? Compare the activity level of https://github.com/VcDevel/std-simd vs https://github.com/google/highway. As to open-source usage, after years of std::experimental, I see <200 search hits [1], vs >400 for Highway [2], even after excluding several library users.

But that aside, I'm not convinced standardization is the best path for a SIMD library. We and external users extend Highway on a weekly basis as new use cases arise. What if we deferred those changes to 3-monthly meetings, or had to wait for one meeting per WD, CD, (FCD), DIS, (FDIS) stage before it's standardized? Standardization seems more useful for rarely-changing things.

1: https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+std::experim...

2: https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+HWY_NAMESPAC...

Thanks for the link. We were previously using GFNI for bit reversal and 8-bit shifts, and I just extended that to our 8-bit BroadcastSignBit (https://github.com/google/highway/pull/1784).