[squeak-dev] OpenCL
Josh Gargus
schwa at fastmail.us
Sat Jan 10 19:36:31 UTC 2009
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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