Floating-point autotuning with customized precisions
自定义精度的浮点自动调优
Xinye Chen, Thibault Hilaire, Fabienne Jézéquel
AI总结 提出一种通过自定义浮点格式实现自动精度调优的方法,结合数值验证与系统搜索生成满足精度要求的程序变体,并在线性求解器和Rodinia基准测试中验证了大部分变量可安全降精度。
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降低精度算术在保持数值精度的前提下,为提高数值应用的性能、内存使用和能效提供了重要机会。本文研究了通过用户定义的指数和尾数大小的自定义浮点格式进行自动精度调优,从而在统一的混合精度框架内模拟新兴的低精度格式并探索非标准精度配置。所提出的方法在PROMISE精度自动调优工具中实现,将数值验证与系统搜索相结合,生成满足用户定义精度要求的程序变体。为解决这种探索的计算成本,一个容器化基准测试框架支持跨多个算法和参数配置的并行执行。该方法在一组数值程序上进行评估,包括线性求解器和Rodinia基准测试中的应用。结果表明,大部分变量可以安全地降低到较低精度而保持准确性,表明标准双精度通常过度配置。这些发现凸显了自动精度调优在根据应用特定精度要求推导高效混合精度配置方面的潜力。
Reduced-precision arithmetic offers significant opportunities to improve performance, memory usage, and energy efficiency in numerical applications, provided that numerical accuracy is preserved. This work investigates automated precision tuning through customized floating-point formats with user-defined exponent and significand sizes, enabling the emulation of emerging low-precision formats and the exploration of non-standard precision configurations within a unified mixed-precision framework. The proposed methodology, implemented in the PROMISE precision autotuning tool, combines numerical validation with a systematic search to generate program variants that satisfy user-defined accuracy requirements. To address the computational cost of this exploration, a containerized benchmarking framework supports parallel execution across multiple algorithms and parameter configurations. The approach is evaluated on a suite of numerical programs, including linear solvers and applications from the Rodinia benchmark. Results show that a substantial proportion of variables can be safely reduced to lower precision while preserving accuracy, indicating that standard double precision is often over-provisioned. These findings highlight the potential of automated precision tuning to derive efficient mixed-precision configurations tailored to application-specific accuracy requirements.