dynamic floating-point error detection

University of Maryland

Dynamic Floating-Point Error Detection

Mike Lam, Jeff Hollingsworth and Pete Stewart

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Motivation Finite precision -> roundoff error

Compromises ill-conditioned calculations Hard to detect and diagnose Increasingly important as HPC grows

Single-precision is faster on GPUs Double-precision fails on long-running

computations Previous solutions are problematic

Numerical analysis requires training Manual re-writing and testing in higher

precision is tedious and time-consuming

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Our Solution• Instrument floating-point instructions

• Automatic• Minimize developer effort• Ensure analysis consistency and correctness

• Binary-level• Include shared libraries w/o source code• Include compiler optimizations

• Runtime• Data-sensitive

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Our Solution• Three parts• Utility that inserts binary instrumentation• Runtime shared library with analysis routines• GUI log viewer

General overview Find floating-point instructions and insert

calls to shared library Run instrumented program View output with GUI

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Our Solution Dyninst-based instrumentation

Cross-platform No special hardware required Stack walking and binary rewriting

Java GUI Cross-platform Minimal development effort

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Our Solution• Cancellation detection• Instrument addition & subtraction• Compare runtime operand values• Report cancelled digits

• Side-by-side (“shadow”) calculations• Instrument all floating-point instructions• Higher/lower precision• Different representation (i.e. rationals)• Report final errors

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Cancellation Detection• Overview• Loss of significant digits during operations

• For each addition/subtraction: Extract value of each operand Calculate result and compare magnitudes

(binary exponents)• If eans < max(ex,ey) there is a

cancellation• For each cancellation event:

• Record a “priority:” max(ex,ey) - eans• Save event information to log

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Gaussian EliminationA -> [L,U]

Comparison of eight methods Classical Classical w/ partial pivoting Classical w/ full pivoting Bordering (“Sherman’s march”) “Pickett’s charge” “Pickett’s charge” w/ partial pivoting Crout’s method Crout’s method w/ partial pivoting

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Gaussian Elimination

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Gaussian Elimination

Classical vs. Bordering

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Gaussian Elimination

Classical BorderingOperations 285 294Cancellations 39 9Cancels/ops 14% 3%Average bits 5.23 22.78

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SPEC Benchmarks• Results are hard to interpret without

domain knowledge

• Overheads:

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Roundoff Error Sparse “shadow value” table

Maps memory addresses to alternate values Shadow values can be single-, double-, quad- or

arbitrary-precision Other ideas: rationals, # of significant digits, etc.

Instrument every FP instruction• Extract operation type and operand addresses• Perform the same operation on corresponding

shadow values• Output shadow values and errors upon

termination

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More Gaussian Elimination

Maximum relative error

25x25 50x50 100x100

Partial pivoting 9.3e-10 2.3e-2 1.0Full pivoting 1.3e-15 2.4e-15 4.8e-15

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Issues & Possible Solutions• Expensive overheads (100-500X)• Optimize with inline snippets• Reduce workload with data flow analysis

• Following values through compiler optimizations• Selectively instrument MOV instructions

• Filtering false positives• Deduce “root cause” of error using data flow

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Conclusion

• Analysis of floating-point error is hard

• Our tool provides automatic analysis of such error

• Work in progress

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Thank you!