Precimonious tuning assistant for floating-point precision

Given the variety of numerical errors that can occur, floating-point programs are difficult to write, test and debug. One common practice employed by developers without an advanced background in numerical analysis is using the highest available precision. While more robust, this can degrade program...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2013 SC - International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC) pp. 1 - 12
Main Authors: Rubio-González, Cindy, Nguyen, Cuong, Nguyen, Hong Diep, Demmel, James, Kahan, William, Sen, Koushik, Bailey, David H., Iancu, Costin, Hough, David
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 17.11.2013
Series:ACM Conferences
Subjects:
Accuracy
Algorithm design and analysis
delta-debugging algorithm
dynamic program analysis
floating-point arithmetic
General and reference > Cross-computing tools and techniques > Verification
Heuristic algorithms
Mathematics of computing > Mathematical analysis > Mathematical optimization
mixed precision
Numerical analysis
Partitioning algorithms
Performance analysis
program optimization
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software development process management
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation > Formal software verification
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation > Software defect analysis > Software testing and debugging
Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools
Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software functional properties > Formal methods > Software verification
Theory of computation > Design and analysis of algorithms > Mathematical optimization
Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning > Program verification
Tuning
floating-point arithmetic
dynamic program analysis
mixed precision
delta-debugging algorithm
program optimization
ISBN:9781450323789, 1450323782
ISSN:2167-4329
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Given the variety of numerical errors that can occur, floating-point programs are difficult to write, test and debug. One common practice employed by developers without an advanced background in numerical analysis is using the highest available precision. While more robust, this can degrade program performance significantly. In this paper we present Precimonious, a dynamic program analysis tool to assist developers in tuning the precision of floating-point programs. Precimonious performs a search on the types of the floating-point program variables trying to lower their precision subject to accuracy constraints and performance goals. Our tool recommends a type instantiation that uses lower precision while producing an accurate enough answer without causing exceptions. We evaluate Precimonious on several widely used functions from the GNU Scientific Library, two NAS Parallel Benchmarks, and three other numerical programs. For most of the programs analyzed, Precimonious reduces precision, which results in performance improvements as high as 41%.
ISBN:9781450323789
1450323782
ISSN:2167-4329
DOI:10.1145/2503210.2503296