On Saturday, 28 March 2020 at 18:01:37 UTC, Crayo List wrote:
On Saturday, 28 March 2020 at 06:56:14 UTC, Bruce Carneal wrote:
On Saturday, 28 March 2020 at 05:21:14 UTC, Crayo List wrote:
On Monday, 23 March 2020 at 18:52:16 UTC, Bruce Carneal wrote:
[snip]
Explicit SIMD code, ispc or other, isn't as readable or
composable or vanilla portable but it certainly is performance
predictable.
This is not true! The idea of ispc is to write portable code
that will
vectorize predictably based on the target CPU. The object
file/binary is not portable,
if that is what you meant.
Also, I find it readable.
There are many waypoints on the readability <==> performance
axis. If ispc works for you along that axis, great!
I find SIMT code readability better than SIMD but a little
worse than auto-vectorizable kernels. Hugely better
performance though for less effort than SIMD if your platform
supports it.
Again I don't think this is true. Unless I am misunderstanding
you, SIMT and SIMD
are not mutually exclusive and if you need performance then you
must use both.
Also based on the workload and processor SIMD may be much more
effective than SIMT.j
SIMD might become part of the solution under the hood for a
number of reasons including: ease of deployment, programmer
familiarity, PCIe xfer overheads, kernel launch overhead, memory
subsystem suitability, existing code base issues, ...
SIMT works for me in high throughput situations where it's hard
to "take a log" on the problem. SIMD, in auto-vectorizable or
more explicit form, works in others.
Combinations can be useful but most of the work I've come in
contact with splits pretty clearly along the memory bandwidth
divide (SIMT on one side, SIMD/CPU on the other). Others need a
plus-up in arithmetic horsepower. The more extreme the
requirements, the more attractive SIMT appears. (hence my
excitement about dcompute possibly expanding the dlang
performance envelope with much less cognitive load than
CUDA/OpenCL/SycL/...)
On the readability front, I find per-lane programming, even with
the current thread-divergence caveats, to be easier to reason
about wrt correctness and performance predictability than other
approaches. Apparently your mileage does vary.
When you have chosen SIMD, whether ispc or other, over SIMT what
drove the decision? Performance? Ease of programming to reach a
target speed?
