[Rd] [External] Re: Workaround very slow NAN/Infinities arithmetic?
Brodie Gaslam
brod|e@g@@|@m @end|ng |rom y@hoo@com
Fri Oct 1 18:07:17 CEST 2021
> On Thursday, September 30, 2021, 01:25:02 PM EDT, <luke-tierney using uiowa.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 30 Sep 2021, brodie gaslam via R-devel wrote:
>>
>> André,
>>
>> I'm not an R core member, but happen to have looked a little bit at this
>> issue myself. I've seen similar things on Skylake and Coffee Lake 2
>> (9700, one generation past your latest) too. I think it would make sense
>> to have some handling of this, although I would want to show the trade-off
>> with performance impacts on CPUs that are not affected by this, and on
>> vectors that don't actually have NAs and similar. I think the performance
>> impact is likely to be small so long as branch prediction is active, but
>> since branch prediction is involved you might need to check with different
>> ratios of NAs (not for your NA bailout branch, but for e.g. interaction
>> of what you add and the existing `na.rm=TRUE` logic).
>
> I would want to see realistic examples where this matters, not
> microbenchmarks, before thinking about complicating the code. Not all
> but most cases where sum(x) returns NaN/NA would eventually result in
> an error; getting to the error faster is not likely to be useful.
That's a very good point, and I'll admit I did not consider it
sufficiently. There are examples such as `rowSums`/`colSums` where some
rows/columns evaluate to NA thus the result is still contains meaningful
data. By extension, any loop that applies `sum` to list elements where
some might contain NAs, and others not. `tapply` or any other group based
aggregation come to mind.
> My understanding is that arm64 does not support proper long doubles
> (they are the same as regular doubles).
Mine is the same.
> So code using long doubles isn't getting the hoped-for improved
> precision. Since that architecture is becoming more common we should
> probably be looking at replacing uses of long doubles with better
> algorithms that can work with regular doubles, e.g Kahan summation or
> variants for sum.
This is probably the bigger issue. If the future is ARM/AMD, the value of
Intel x87-only optimizations becomes questionable.
More generally is the question of whether to completely replace long
double with algorithmic precision methods, at a cost of performance on
systems that do support hardware long doubles (Intel or otherwise), or
whether both code pathways are kept and selected at compile time. Or
maybe the aggregation functions gain a low-precision flag for simple
double precision accumulation.
I'm curious to look at the performance and precision implications of e.g.
Kahan summation if no one has done that yet. Some quick poking around
shows people using processor specific intrinsics to take advantage of
advanced multi-element instructions, but I imagine R would not want to do
that. Assuming others have not done this already, I will have a look and
report back.
>> Since we're on the topic I want to point out that the default NA in R
>> starts off as a signaling NA:
>>
>> example(numToBits) # for `bitC`
>> bitC(NA_real_)
>> ## [1] 0 11111111111 | 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000011110100010
>> bitC(NA_real_ + 0)
>> ## [1] 0 11111111111 | 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000011110100010
>>
>> Notice the leading bit of the significant starts off as zero, which marks
>> it as a signaling NA, but becomes 1, i.e. non-signaling, after any
>> operation[2].
>>
>> This is meaningful because the mere act of loading a signaling NA into the
>> x87 FPU is sufficient to trigger the slowdowns, even if the NA is not
>> actually used in arithmetic operations. This happens sometimes under some
>> optimization levels. I don't now of any benefit of starting off with a
>> signaling NA, especially since the encoding is lost pretty much as soon as
>> it is used. If folks are interested I can provide patch to turn the NA
>> quiet by default.
>
> In principle this might be a good idea, but the current bit pattern is
> unfortunately baked into a number of packages and documents on
> internals, as well as serialized objects. The work needed to sort that
> out is probably not worth the effort.
One reason why we might not need to sort this out is precisely the
instability shown above. Anything that relies on the signaling bit set to
a particular value will behave differently with `NA_real_` vs
`NA_real_ + x`. `R_IsNA` only checks the lower word, so it doesn't care
about the signaling bit or the 19 subsequent ones. Anything that does
likely has unpredictable behavior **currently**.
Similarly, the documentation[1] only specifies the low word:
> On such platforms NA is represented by the NaN value with low-word 0x7a2
> (1954 in decimal).
This is consistent with the semantics of `R_IsNA`.
> It also doesn't seem to affect the performance issue here since
> setting b[1] <- NA_real_ + 0 produces the same slowdown (at least on
> my current Intel machine).
The subtlety here is that the slowdown happens by merely loading the
signaling NaN onto the X87 FPU. Consider the following:
x <- t(1:1e7+1L)
system.time(rowSums(x))
## user system elapsed
## 1.685 0.007 1.693
If we apply the following patch to make NA_REAL quiet:
Index: src/main/arithmetic.c
===================================================================
--- src/main/arithmetic.c (revision 80996)
+++ src/main/arithmetic.c (working copy)
@@ -117,7 +117,7 @@
/* The gcc shipping with Fedora 9 gets this wrong without
* the volatile declaration. Thanks to Marc Schwartz. */
volatile ieee_double x;
- x.word[hw] = 0x7ff00000;
+ x.word[hw] = 0x7ff80000;
x.word[lw] = 1954;
return x.value;
}
We get a ~25x speedup:
x <- t(1:1e7+1L)
system.time(rowSums(x))
## user system elapsed
## 0.068 0.000 0.068
This despite no NAs anywhere in sight. I observe the slow behavior on
both Skylake, Coffee Lake 2 and others, across different OSes, so long as
the -O2 compilation flag is used.
This likely happens because the compiler tries to prepare for the `keepNA`
branch in[1]:
case INTSXP:
{
int *ix = INTEGER(x) + (R_xlen_t)n*j;
for (cnt = 0, sum = 0., i = 0; i < n; i++, ix++)
if (*ix != NA_INTEGER) {cnt++; sum += *ix;}
else if (keepNA) {sum = NA_REAL; break;}
break;
}
by loading an NA_REAL into the FPU. At least that was my interpretation
of the following machine code (dumped from src/main/array.o). I barely
understand ASM, but it looks like 9bd4 loads R_NaReal, and this happens
before the test for NA at 9be8:
case LGLSXP: # looks like INTSXP/LGLSXP branches collapsed
{
int *ix = LOGICAL(x) + (R_xlen_t)n * j;
9bc8: 4d 01 e3 add r11,r12
for (R_xlen_t i = 0; i < n; i++, ra++, ix++)
9bcb: 48 85 db test rbx,rbx
9bce: 0f 8e fc fe ff ff jle 9ad0 <do_colsum+0x260>
if (keepNA) {
if (*ix != NA_LOGICAL) *ra += *ix;
else *ra = NA_REAL;
9bd4: dd 05 00 00 00 00 fld QWORD PTR [rip+0x0] # 9bda <do_colsum+0x36a>
9bd6: R_X86_64_PC32 R_NaReal-0x4
9bda: 48 8b 95 60 ff ff ff mov rdx,QWORD PTR [rbp-0xa0]
for (R_xlen_t i = 0; i < n; i++, ra++, ix++)
9be1: 31 c0 xor eax,eax
9be3: eb 2c jmp 9c11 <do_colsum+0x3a1>
9be5: 0f 1f 00 nop DWORD PTR [rax]
if (*ix != NA_LOGICAL) *ra += *ix;
9be8: 45 39 d0 cmp r8d,r10d
9beb: 74 5b je 9c48 <do_colsum+0x3d8>
9bed: 44 89 85 78 ff ff ff mov DWORD PTR [rbp-0x88],r8d
9bf4: db 85 78 ff ff ff fild DWORD PTR [rbp-0x88]
9bfa: db 2a fld TBYTE PTR [rdx]
9bfc: de c1 faddp st(1),st
9bfe: db 3a fstp TBYTE PTR [rdx]
... SNIP
9c48: db 3a fstp TBYTE PTR [rdx]
9c4a: db 2a fld TBYTE PTR [rdx]
9c4c: eb b2 jmp 9c00 <do_colsum+0x390>
If no NA_LOGICAL (NA_INTEGER) are encountered, the NaN is not used.
However, it is always loaded, and for signaling NaNs this alone appears
to switch the FPU to turtle mode.
But more important than whether I can interpret ASM correctly (dubious),
simply changing the NA_REAL value to be of the quiet variety dramatically
improves performance of `rowSums` with integers.
Ironically, this doesn't happen with the REALSXP branch because that one
relies on NaN propagation in the FPU so doesn't load the NA_REAL for the
early-break case when it encounters one. Of course if it does encounter a
NaN, quiet or not, we get a slowdown.
Compiling with -O3 also fixes this.
Bad performance of `rowSums` on integers alone is not really that big a
deal given the output is numeric, and that's why I never reported this
despite having known about it for a while. But André's e-mail pushed me
into saying something about it. There is a risk that code relies on the
full bit pattern of NA_REAL, but I think those are probably broken
currently since the signaling bit is even more unstable than the general
payload bits.
Best,
B.
[1]: https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn/blob/6891db49680629427e3d5927053531b8fa5d8ee3/src/main/array.c#L1939
[2]: https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-data.html#Special-values
> Best,
>
> luke
>
>
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> B.
>>
>> [1]: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/thats-not-normalthe-performance-of-odd-floats/
>> [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaN#Encoding
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Thursday, September 30, 2021, 06:52:59 AM EDT, GILLIBERT, Andre <andre.gillibert using chu-rouen.fr> wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear R developers,
>>>
>>> By default, R uses the "long double" data type to get extra precision for intermediate computations, with a small performance tradeoff.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, on all Intel x86 computers I have ever seen, long doubles (implemented in the x87 FPU) are extremely slow whenever a special representation (NA, NaN or infinities) is used; probably because it triggers poorly optimized microcode in the CPU firmware. A function such as sum() becomes more than hundred times slower!
>>> Test code:
>>> a=runif(1e7);system.time(for(i in 1:100)sum(a))
>>> b=a;b[1]=NA;system.time(sum(b))
>>>
>>> The slowdown factors are as follows on a few intel CPU:
>>>
>>> 1) Pentium Gold G5400 (Coffee Lake, 8th generation) with R 64 bits : 140 times slower with NA
>>>
>>> 2) Pentium G4400 (Skylake, 6th generation) with R 64 bits : 150 times slower with NA
>>>
>>> 3) Pentium G3220 (Haswell, 4th generation) with R 64 bits : 130 times slower with NA
>>>
>>> 4) Celeron J1900 (Atom Silvermont) with R 64 bits : 45 times slower with NA
>>>
>>> I do not have access to more recent Intel CPUs, but I doubt that it has improved much.
>>>
>>> Recent AMD CPUs have no significant slowdown.
>>> There is no significant slowdown on Intel CPUs (more recent than Sandy Bridge) for 64 bits floating point calculations based on SSE2. Therefore, operators using doubles, such as '+' are unaffected.
>>>
>>> I do not know whether recent ARM CPUs have slowdowns on FP64... Maybe somebody can test.
>>>
>>> Since NAs are not rare in real-life, I think that it would worth an extra check in functions based on long doubles, such as sum(). The check for special representations do not necessarily have to be done at each iteration for cumulative functions.
>>> If you are interested, I can write a bunch of patches to fix the main functions using long doubles: cumsum, cumprod, sum, prod, rowSums, colSums, matrix multiplication (matprod="internal").
>>>
>>> What do you think of that?
>>>
>>> --
>>> Sincerely
>>> Andr� GILLIBERT
>>>
>>> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>
>>
>> ______________________________________________
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>
>>
>
> --
> Luke Tierney
> Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
> University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386
> Department of Statistics and Fax: 319-335-3017
> Actuarial Science
> 241 Schaeffer Hall email: luke-tierney using uiowa.edu
> Iowa City, IA 52242 WWW: http://www.stat.uiowa.edu
>
>
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