OpenCL Sinus Implementation - opencl

I'm looking for the OpenCL Sinus Implementation.
Well, I know, the OpenCL Implementation is hardware-vendor-specific, so the Nvidia OpenCL Implementation could look different from the AMD one. But I want to know, whether I need to implement my own sinus for speed reasons.
Accepting this, where is the difference between sin and native_sin?

Here is an amd implementation, testing repeated sin function on itself so any error will make it more chaotic as iterations increase(100 in this example):
__kernel void sin_test_0(__global float *a)
{
int id = get_global_id(0);
float r=a[id];
for(int i=0;i<100;i++)
r = sin(r);
a[id]=r;
}
a[id] was given value of 1111 first for all 16m elements.
sin() = -0,1692203; completed in 265 ms(320 core gpu) and 1950 ms(8 core cpu using float4)
C#'s implementation with Math library = -0,1692202; completed in 55505 ms(single core) and 12998 ms (4 threads) and 8200 ms (max threads Parallel.For) without any explicit compiler hints about vectorization.
native_sin() = -0,1692208; completed in 45 ms
half_sin() = -0,1692207; completed in 165 ms
series expansion of sine(for input=[-1,1]) = -0,155202; completed in 40 ms
only 7th digit is different and that may be because of C# using double type for computing and native version is a bit farther than original. Half seems to be even better than native but slower. Half_sin has a range of -2^16 to 2^16.
Series expansion:
float sin_se(float x)
{
x -= 6.28318530718f*(convert_int(x*0.15915494309f));
float xs=x*x;
float xc=x*x*x;
return ((x - xc*0.166666f) + (xc*xs)*0.0083333f)- (xc*xs*xs)*0.0001984f;
}
if input is between -1 and +1, first line is not necessary and this becomes faster.
native_sin() is probably using its hardware based options to speed-up. These options could be a look up table for magic numbers and a newton-raphson engine. You may not surpass performance of these parts by software emulation for an equal error. Upper example is on a gpu and there is minor difference using a cpu. Even if opencl dictates that all devices must have less than 100 ULP error, a device may have 90 ULP but other 70ULP and accumulated error increases gap between them. If you think you dont accumulate error much and if you have safety digits, then you could just use native_sin, else, you can add your series expansion-like algorithm so all devices compute same way but with more error.

Related

How do I plan this least-squares computation on a GPU?

I'm writing a program called PerfectTIN (https://github.com/phma/perfecttin) which does lots of least-squares adjustments of a TIN to fit a point cloud. Each adjustment takes some contiguous group of triangles and adjusts the elevations of up to 8 points, which are corners of the triangles, to fit the dots in the triangles. I have it working on SMP. At the start of processing, it does only one adjustment at a time, so it splits the adjustment into tasks, each of which takes some dots, all of which are in the same triangle. Each thread takes a task from a queue and computes a small square matrix and a small column vector. When they're all ready, the adjustment routine adds up the matrices and the vectors and finishes the least squares computation.
I'd like to process tasks on the GPU as well as the CPU. The data needed for a task are
The three corners of the triangle (x,y,z)
The coordinates of the dots (x,y,z).
The output data are
A symmetric matrix with up to nine nonzero entries (since it's symmetric, I need only compute six numbers)
A column vector with the same number of rows.
The number of dots is a multiple of 1024, except for a few tasks which I can handle in the CPU (the total number of dots in a triangle can be any nonnegative integer). For a fairly large point cloud of 56 million dots, some tasks are larger than 131072 dots.
Here is part of the output of clinfo (if you need other parts, let me know):
Platform Name Clover
Number of devices 1
Device Name Radeon RX 590 Series (POLARIS10, DRM 3.33.0, 5.3.0-7625-generic, LLVM 9.0.0)
Device Vendor AMD
Device Vendor ID 0x1002
Device Version OpenCL 1.1 Mesa 19.2.8
Driver Version 19.2.8
Device OpenCL C Version OpenCL C 1.1
Device Type GPU
Device Profile FULL_PROFILE
Device Available Yes
Compiler Available Yes
Max compute units 36
Max clock frequency 1545MHz
Max work item dimensions 3
Max work item sizes 256x256x256
Max work group size 256
Preferred work group size multiple 64
Preferred / native vector sizes
char 16 / 16
short 8 / 8
int 4 / 4
long 2 / 2
half 8 / 8 (cl_khr_fp16)
float 4 / 4
double 2 / 2 (cl_khr_fp64)
Double-precision Floating-point support (cl_khr_fp64)
Denormals Yes
Infinity and NANs Yes
Round to nearest Yes
Round to zero Yes
Round to infinity Yes
IEEE754-2008 fused multiply-add Yes
Support is emulated in software No
If I understand right, if I put one dot in each core of the GPU, the total number of dots I can process at once is 36×256=9×1024=9216. Could I put four dots in each core, since a work group would then have 1024 dots? In this case I could process 36864 dots at once. How many dots should each core process? What if a task is bigger than the GPU can hold? What if several tasks (possibly from different triangles) fit in the GPU?
Of course I want this code to run on other GPUs than mine. I'm going to use OpenCL for portability. What different GPUs (description rather than name) am I going to encounter?
If I understand right, if I put one dot in each core of the GPU, the total number of dots I can process at once is 36×256=9×1024=9216.
Not quite. The total number of dots is not limited by the maximum work group size. The work group size is the number of GPU threads working synchronously in a group. Within a work group, you can share data via local memory, which can be useful to speed up certain calculations like matrix multiplications for example (cache tiling).
The idea of GPU parallelization is to split the prioblem up into as many independent parts as there are. In C++ something like
void example(float* data, const int N) {
for(int n=0; n<N; n++) {
data[n] += 1.0f;
}
}
in OpenCL becomes this
kernel void example(global float* data ) {
const int n = get_global_id(0) ;
data[n] += 1.0f;
}
where the global range of the kernel is set to N.
Each GPU thread should process only a single dot. The number of threads (global range) can and should be much larger than the number of GPU cores available. If you don't explicitly need local memory (all threads can work independent), you can set the local work group size to either 32, 64, 128 or 256 - it doesn't matter - but there might be some performance difference between these values. However the global range (total number of threads / points) must be a multiple of the work group size.
What if a task is bigger than the GPU can hold?
I assume you mean when your data set does not fit into video memory all at once. In this case you can do the computation in several batches, so exchange the GPU buffers using PCIe transfers. But that comes at a large performance penalty.
Of course I want this code to run on other GPUs than mine. I'm going to use OpenCL for portability. What different GPUs (description rather than name) am I going to encounter?
OpenCL is excellent for portability across devices and operating systems. Other than AMD GPUs and CPUs, you will encounter Nvidia GPUs, which only support OpenCL 1.2, and Intel GPUs and CPUs. If the graphics drivers are installed, your code will run on all of them without issues. Just be aware that the amount of video memory can be vastly different.

Inaccurate results with OpenCL Reduction example

I am working with the OpenCL reduction example provided by Apple here
After a few days of dissecting it, I understand the basics; I've converted it to a version that runs more or less reliably on c++ (Openframeworks) and finds the largest number in the input set.
However, in doing so, a few questions have arisen as follows:
why are multiple passes used? the most I have been able to cause the reduction to require is two; the latter pass only taking a very low number of elements and so being very unsuitable for an openCL process (i.e. wouldn't it be better to stick to a single pass and then process the results of that on the cpu?)
when I set the 'count' number of elements to a very high number (24M and up) and the type to a float4, I get inaccurate (or totally wrong) results. Why is this?
in the openCL kernels, can anyone explain what is being done here:
while (i < n){
int a = LOAD_GLOBAL_I1(input, i);
int b = LOAD_GLOBAL_I1(input, i + group_size);
int s = LOAD_LOCAL_I1(shared, local_id);
STORE_LOCAL_I1(shared, local_id, (a + b + s));
i += local_stride;
}
as opposed to what is being done here?
#define ACCUM_LOCAL_I1(s, i, j) \
{ \
int x = ((__local int*)(s))[(size_t)(i)]; \
int y = ((__local int*)(s))[(size_t)(j)]; \
((__local int*)(s))[(size_t)(i)] = (x + y); \
}
Thanks!
S
To answer the first 2 questions:
why are multiple passes used?
Reducing millions of elements to a few thousands can be done in parallel with a device utilization of almost 100%. But the final step is quite tricky. So, instead of keeping everything in one shot and have multiple threads idle, Apple implementation decided to do a first pass reduction; then adapt the work items to the new reduction problem, and finally completing it.
Ii is a very specific optimization for OpenCL, but it may not be for C++.
when I set the 'count' number of elements to a very high number (24M
and up) and the type to a float4, I get inaccurate (or totally wrong)
results. Why is this?
A float32 precision is 2^23 the remainder. Values higher than 24M = 1.43 x 2^24 (in float representation), have an error in the range +/-(2^24/2^23)/2 ~= 1.
That means, if you do:
float A=24000000;
float B= A + 1; //~1 error here
The operator error is in the range of the data, therefore... big errors if you repeat that in a loop!
This will not happen in 64bits CPUs, because the 32bits float math uses internally 48bits precision, therefore avoiding these errors. However if you get the float close to 2^48 they will happen as well. But that is not the typical case for normal "counting" integers.
The problem is with the precision of 32 bit floats. You're not the first person to ask about this either. OpenCL reduction result wrong with large floats

OpenCL and Tesla M1060

I'm using the Tesla m1060 for GPGPU computation. It has the following specs:
# of Tesla GPUs 1
# of Streaming Processor Cores (XXX per processor) 240
Memory Interface (512-bit per GPU) 512-bit
When I use OpenCL, I can display the following board information:
available platform OpenCL 1.1 CUDA 6.5.14
device Tesla M1060 type:CL_DEVICE_TYPE_GPU
max compute units:30
max work item dimensions:3
max work item sizes (dim:0):512
max work item sizes (dim:1):512
max work item sizes (dim:2):64
global mem size(bytes):4294770688 local mem size:16383
How can I relate the GPU card informations to the OpenCL memory informations ?
For example:
What does "Memory Interace" means ? Is it linked the a Work Item ?
How can I relate the "240 cores" of the GPU to Work Groups/Items ?
How can I map the work-groups to it (what would be the number of Work groups to use) ?
Thanks
EDIT:
After the following answers, there is a thing that is still unclear to me:
The CL_KERNEL_PREFERRED_WORK_GROUP_SIZE_MULTIPLE value is 32 for the kernel I use.
However, my device has a CL_DEVICE_MAX_COMPUTE_UNITS value of 30.
In the OpenCL 1.1 Api, it is written (p. 15):
Compute Unit: An OpenCL device has one or more compute units. A work-group executes on a single compute unit
It seems that either something is incoherent here, or that I didn't fully understand the difference between Work-Groups and Compute Units.
As previously stated, when I set the number of Work Groups to 32, the programs fails with the following error:
Entry function uses too much shared data (0x4020 bytes, 0x4000 max).
The value 16 works.
Addendum
Here is my Kernel signature:
// enable double precision (not enabled by default)
#ifdef cl_khr_fp64
#pragma OPENCL EXTENSION cl_khr_fp64 : enable
#else
#error "IEEE-754 double precision not supported by OpenCL implementation."
#endif
#define BLOCK_SIZE 16 // --> this is what defines the WG size to me
__kernel __attribute__((reqd_work_group_size(BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, 1)))
void mmult(__global double * A, __global double * B, __global double * C, const unsigned int q)
{
__local double A_sub[BLOCK_SIZE][BLOCK_SIZE];
__local double B_sub[BLOCK_SIZE][BLOCK_SIZE];
// stuff that does matrix multiplication with __local
}
In the host code part:
#define BLOCK_SIZE 16
...
const size_t local_work_size[2] = {BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE};
...
status = clEnqueueNDRangeKernel(command_queue, kernel, 2, NULL, global_work_size, local_work_size, 0, NULL, NULL);
The memory interface doesn't mean anything to an opencl application. It is the number of bits the memory controller has for reading/writing to the memory (the ddr5 part in modern gpus). The formula for maximum global memory speed is approximately: pipelineWidth * memoryClockSpeed, but since opencl is meant to be cross-platform, you won't really need to know this value unless you are trying to figure out an upper bound for memory performance. Knowing about the 512-bit interface is somewhat useful when you're dealing with memory coalescing. wiki: Coalescing (computer science)
The max work item sizes have to do with 1) how the hardware schedules computations, and 2) the amount of low-level memory on the device -- eg. private memory and local memory.
The 240 figure doesn't matter to opencl very much either. You can determine that each of the 30 compute units is made up of 8 streaming processor cores for this gpu architecture (because 240/30 = 8). If you query for CL_KERNEL_PREFERRED_WORK_GROUP_SIZE_MULTIPLE, it will very likey be a multiple of 8 for this device. see: clGetKernelWorkGroupInfo
I have answered a similar questions about work group sizing. see here, and here
Ultimately, you need to tune your application and kernels based on your own bench-marking results. I find it worth the time to write many tests with various work group sizes and eventually hard-code the optimal size.
Adding another answer to address your local memory issue.
Entry function uses too much shared data (0x4020 bytes, 0x4000 max)
Since you are allocating A_sub and B_sub, each having 32*32*sizeof(double), you run out of local memory. The device should be allowing you to allocate 16kb, or 0x4000 bytes of local memory without an issue.
0x4020 is 32 bytes or 4 doubles more than what your device allows. There are only two things I can think of that may cause the error: 1) there could be a bug with your device or drivers preventing you from allocating the full 16kb, or 2) you are allocating the memory somewhere else in your kernel.
You will have to use a BLOCK_SIZE value less than 32 to work around this for now.
There's good news though. If you only want to hit a multiple of CL_KERNEL_PREFERRED_WORK_GROUP_SIZE_MULTIPLE as a work group size, BLOCK_SIZE=16 already does this for you. (16*16 = 256 = 32*8). To better take advantage of local memory, try BLOCK_SIZE=24. (576=32*18)

Why Nvidia and AMD OpenCL reduction example did not reduce an array to an element in one go?

I am working on some OpenCL reduction and I found AMD and Nvidia both has some example like the following kernel (this one is taken from Nvidia's website, but AMD has a similar one):
__kernel void reduce2(__global T *g_idata, __global T *g_odata, unsigned int n, __local T* sdata){
// load shared mem
unsigned int tid = get_local_id(0);
unsigned int i = get_global_id(0);
sdata[tid] = (i < n) ? g_idata[i] : 0;
barrier(CLK_LOCAL_MEM_FENCE);
// do reduction in shared mem
for(unsigned int s=get_local_size(0)/2; s>0; s>>=1)
{
if (tid < s)
{
sdata[tid] += sdata[tid + s];
}
barrier(CLK_LOCAL_MEM_FENCE);
}
// write result for this block to global mem
if (tid == 0) g_odata[get_group_id(0)] = sdata[0];}
I have two questions:
the code above reduce an array to another smaller array, I am just wondering why all the example I saw did the same instead of reducing an array directly into a single element, which is the usual semantic of "reduction" (IMHO). This should be easily achievable with an outer loop inside the kernel. Is there special reason for this?
I have implemented this reduction and found it quite slow, is there any optimisation I can do to improve it? I saw another example used some unrolling to avoid synchronisation in the loop, but I did not quite get the idea, can you explain a bit?
The reduction problem in a multithread environment is a very special parallel problem. There is one path that needs to be done sequentially, which is the element 0 to the power of 2.
Even if you had infinite threads for processing, you will need log2(N) passes trough the array to reduce it to a single element.
In a real system your number of threads (work-items) are reduced but high (~128-2048). So, in order to use them efficiently all of them have to have something to do. But since the problem is more and more serial and less parallel as you reduce the size of the reduction. These algorithms only bother about the high part, and let the CPU do the rest of the reduction.
To make the story short. You can reduce an array from 1024 to 512 in one pass, but you need the same power to reduce it from 2 to 1. In the latter case all the threads minus 1 are idle, an incredible waste of GPU resources (99.7% idle).
As you can see, there is no point in reducing this last part on a GPU. It is easier to simply copy it to CPU and do it sequentially.
Answering your question: Yes, it is slow, and will always be. If there was a magic trick to solve it, then AMD and nVIDIA would be using it don't you think? :)
For question 1: This kernel reduces a big array into a smaller one and not a single element because there is no synchronization possible between work-groups. so each work-group can reduces its portion of the array to one elements but after that all these single elements given by each work-group need to be written in global memory before a new pass is performed. This could go on until the moment the array is small enough to have only one work-group running.
For question 2: There is several approaches to perform a reduction with different performance. How to improve performance for such problem is discussed in this article from the AMD resources. Hope you'll find it useful.

OpenCL computation times much longer than CPU alternative

I'm taking my first steps in OpenCL (and CUDA) for my internship. All nice and well, I now have working OpenCL code, but the computation times are way too high, I think. My guess is that I'm doing too much I/O, but I don't know where that could be.
The code is for the main: http://pastebin.com/i4A6kPfn, and for the kernel: http://pastebin.com/Wefrqifh I'm starting to measure time after segmentPunten(segmentArray, begin, eind); has returned, and I end measuring time after the last clEnqueueReadBuffer.
Computation time on a Nvidia GT440 is 38.6 seconds, on a GT555M 35.5, on a Athlon II X4 5.6 seconds, and on a Intel P8600 6 seconds.
Can someone explain this to me? Why are the computation times are so high, and what solutions are there for this?
What is it supposed to do: (short version) to calculate how much noiseload there is made by an airplane that is passing by.
long version: there are several Observer Points (OP) wich are the points in wich sound is measured from an airplane thas is passing by. The flightpath is being segmented in 10.000 segments, this is done at the function segmentPunten. The double for loop in the main gives OPs a coordinate. There are two kernels. The first one calculates the distance from a single OP to a single segment. This is then saved in the array "afstanden". The second kernel calculates the sound load in an OP, from all the segments.
Just eyeballing your kernel, I see this:
kernel void SEL(global const float *afstanden, global double *totaalSEL,
const int aantalSegmenten)
{
// ...
for(i = 0; i < aantalSegmenten; i++) {
double distance = afstanden[threadID * aantalSegmenten + i];
// ...
}
// ...
}
It looks like aantalSegmenten is being set to 1000. You have a loop in each
kernel that accesses global memory 1000 times. Without crawling though the code,
I'm guessing that many of these accesses overlap when considering your
computation as a whole. It this the case? Will two work items access the same
global memory? If this is the case, you will see a potentially huge win on the
GPU from rewriting your algorithm to partition the work such that you can read
from a specific global memory only once, saving it in local memory. After that,
each work item in the work group that needs that location can read it quickly.
As an aside, the CL specification allows you to omit the leading __ from CL
keywords like global and kernel. I don't think many newcomers to CL realize
that.
Before optimizing further, you should first get an understanding of what is taking all that time. Is it the kernel compiles, data transfer, or actual kernel execution?
As mentioned above, you can get rid of the kernel compiles by caching the results. I believe some OpenCL implementations (the Apple one at least) already do this automatically. With other, you may need to do the caching manually. Here's instructions for the caching.
If the performance bottle neck is the kernel itself, you can probably get a major speed-up by organizing the 'afstanden' array lookups differently. Currently when a block of threads performs a read from the memory, the addresses are spread out through the memory, which is a real killer for GPU performance. You'd ideally want to index array with something like afstanden[ndx*NUM_THREADS + threadID], which would make accesses from a work group to load a contiguous block of memory. This is much faster than the current, essentially random, memory lookup.
First of all you are measuring not the computation time but the whole kernel read-in/compile/execute mumbo-jumbo. To do a fair comparison measure the computation time from the first "non-static" part of your program. (For example from between the first clSetKernelArgs to the last clEnqueueReadBuffer.)
If the execution time is still too high, then you can use some kind of profiler (such as VisualProfiler from NVidia), and read the OpenCL Best Practices guid which is included in the CUDA Toolkit documentation.
To the raw kernel execution time: Consider (and measure) that do you really need the double precision for your calculation, because the double precision calculations are artificially slowed down on the consumer grade NVidia cards.

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