Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> On 10.01.2009, at 11:01, Josh Gargus wrote:
>> As noted by John, Croquet uses fdlibm for bit-identical floating 
>> point math.  Does anyone have a feeling for how difficult (or 
>> impossible) it will be to achieve identical computation on 
>> OpenCL-compliant devices?
>
> The numerical behavior of compliant OpenCL implementations is covered 
> in section 7 of the OpenCL spec. In particular, table 7.1 gives the 
> error bounds for the various operations. If I interpret that 
> correctly, very few functions are guaranteed to behave bit-identical.

Oops, I was skimming by the time I read that part of the spec.  I saw 
that the transcendental functions need not return identical results 
(which was why I mentioned porting fdlibm), but I missed that even x/y 
isn't precisely specified.

>
>>   For example, how difficult would it be to port, say, fdlibm, so 
>> that trancedentals use the exact same code?  Any other show-stoppers 
>> that might not occur to the naive mind :-)  ?
>
> Well OpenCL only requires single-precision, double-precision support 
> is optional, whereas fdlibm is double-precision only. 

I didn't know that.  Maybe that's what the "d" stands for in "fdlibm".

> I don't know how compliant current implementations actually are.

I think that there's only one implementation right now, and only 
available to paid-up Apple developers.  Anyway, I'm more interested in 
what the spec says than current conformance... implementations will 
gradually become more compliant.

Thanks,
Josh


> - Bert -
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