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2020-07-02

Yesterday, and the plan for today

I've been on vacation for the last week and a half, so today is going to be mostly about getting back up to speed. To take it easy, I'll investigate why the bfast benchmark is not getting autotuned correctly. I also want to dedicate some time to writing a retrospective on the process of writing these technical diary entries.

Retrospective

Let's start with some statistics first.

$ wc -l *.org
  412 2020-06-08.org
  291 2020-06-09.org
  449 2020-06-10.org
   35 2020-06-11.org
   21 2020-06-12.org
   40 2020-06-15.org
   94 2020-06-16.org
  122 2020-06-17.org
   92 2020-06-18.org
   30 2020-06-19.org
   14 2020-07-02.org

I've written 10 entries so far, one for each work-day since I started this experiment. The first three days are by far the longest entries, mostly because of some long source listings, but also because the entries themselves were written more in-depth. Some of the later entries are very short, just 14 lines for the last one.

Why are some entries so short? Part of it is certainly that, on some days, less actual work gets done than on others. There are also types of work that is harder to write useful reflections about: applying aliasing to my last-use analysis as described in the entry from 2020-06-19, for instance, is mostly just about fiddling with the current code, looking up some functions in the Futhark library and so forth. However, I think the biggest reason why the entries on some days are shorter than on other days, is that I don't have or take the time to actually write in the diary as I work. Writing continually throughout the day, using the writing as a way to concretize what I'm doing, to help steer my process, was the goal all along, but it is difficult to keep up and requires discipline. Sometimes it's just easier to hack along on some code or try to fix some bug without having to document everything as I go along.

I think it's important to find a compromise that works for me. Ideally, I'd like to document everything meticulously as I did in some of those first days: doing to resulted in some productive days, and it's great to be able to go back and read what I was doing. But I probably also have to face that that's not going to work every day, at least not initially.

One final thing that I'll note, is that I sometimes "forget" to finish my entry for the day. Either because I have to hurry out of the office to go somewhere, or because I simply forget to. Sometimes I finish up the entry later in the evening, and sometimes I only get around to it the day after. I don't think there's any shame in doing so, after all, no-one is sitting around waiting for my daily entry, but I have noticed that when I don't finish up my daily entry in a timely manner, I miss that end-of-the-day reflective thinking. I think that, by trying to be a bit more diligent about finishing up the entry as part of the actual work-day, I could improve the re-readability and the reflective quaility of the entries.

bfast

As mentioned previously, Troels has mentioned that bfast is not being tuned correctly using the new autotuner I created, or at least that it is not as fast as it should be. The problem could also be that bfast is just slower with incremental flattening than without. Let's try to find out what's wrong.

First, we'll build and install the latest version of Futhark on gpu04. When that is done, let's run the bfast benchmark with and without tuning, and compare the results. Perhaps we need to compare to an older version of Futhark also, maybe the one just before merging default incremental flattening? That would be 0.15.8. Thankfully, I already have that installed on gpu04.

Here's the untuned benchmark results using current master:

$ futhark bench --backend=opencl --json untuned.json --no-tuning --runs 100 bfast.fut
Compiling bfast.fut...
Reporting average runtime of 100 runs for each dataset.

Results for bfast.fut:
data/sahara.in:      14883μs (RSD: 0.004; min:  -0%; max:  +3%)

Here's the tuning results:

$ futhark autotune --backend=opencl bfast.fut
Compiling bfast.fut...
Tuning main.suff_intra_par_12 on entry point main and dataset data/sahara.in
Tuning main.suff_outer_par_10 on entry point main and dataset data/sahara.in
Tuning main.suff_outer_par_16 on entry point main and dataset data/sahara.in
Tuning main.suff_outer_par_15 on entry point main and dataset data/sahara.in
Tuning main.suff_outer_par_8 on entry point main and dataset data/sahara.in
Tuning main.suff_outer_par_9 on entry point main and dataset data/sahara.in
Tuning main.suff_intra_par_6 on entry point main and dataset data/sahara.in
Tuning main.suff_outer_par_5 on entry point main and dataset data/sahara.in
Wrote bfast.fut.tuning
Result of autotuning:
main.suff_intra_par_12=2000000000
main.suff_intra_par_6=2000000000
main.suff_outer_par_10=2000000000
main.suff_outer_par_15=543744
main.suff_outer_par_16=4349952
main.suff_outer_par_5=2000000000
main.suff_outer_par_8=28138752
main.suff_outer_par_9=543744

The tuned benchmark results:

$ futhark bench --backend=opencl --json tuned.json --runs 100 bfast.fut
Compiling bfast.fut...
Reporting average runtime of 100 runs for each dataset.

Results for bfast.fut (using bfast.fut.tuning):
data/sahara.in:      11976μs (RSD: 0.141; min: -14%; max: +22%)

And the comparison:

$ ../../../tools/cmp-bench-json.py untuned.json tuned.json

bfast.fut
  data/sahara.in:                                                       1.24x

So, tuning the program definitely gives us an improvement over the untuned version. Now there are two questions: Are the tuning parameters actually optimal, and is the performance of the tuned program a regression from earlier results without incremental flattening?

Let's investigate the latter first:

$ futhark-0.15.8 bench --backend=opencl --json 0.15.8.json --no-tuning --runs 100 bfast.fut
Compiling bfast.fut...
Reporting average runtime of 100 runs for each dataset.

Results for bfast.fut:
data/sahara.in:       7873μs (RSD: 0.064; min:  -2%; max: +24%)

Aha! Our tuned program with incremental flattening is 33% slower than the untuned version from Futhark 0.15.8. Let's see what kernels are being run (filtered for just the kernels with at least 1 run):

$ futhark opencl bfast.fut
$ gunzip -c data/sahara.in.gz | ./bfast -e main -P --tuning bfast.fut.tuning > /dev/null
Peak memory usage for space 'device': 734489448 bytes.
copy_dev_to_dev              ran     4 times; avg:        6us; total:       26us
copy_5781                    ran     1 times; avg:       97us; total:       97us
main.scan_stage1_1973        ran     1 times; avg:      589us; total:      589us
main.scan_stage2_1973        ran     1 times; avg:        7us; total:        7us
main.scan_stage3_1973        ran     1 times; avg:       98us; total:       98us
main.segmap_1050             ran     1 times; avg:       22us; total:       22us
main.segmap_1171             ran     1 times; avg:        7us; total:        7us
main.segmap_1229             ran     1 times; avg:        6us; total:        6us
main.segmap_1899             ran     1 times; avg:      196us; total:      196us
main.segmap_2002             ran     1 times; avg:        4us; total:        4us
main.segmap_2187             ran     1 times; avg:       48us; total:       48us
main.segmap_2460             ran     8 times; avg:      132us; total:     1062us
main.segmap_2510             ran     8 times; avg:      154us; total:     1234us
main.segmap_2664             ran     1 times; avg:      148us; total:      148us
main.segmap_2705             ran     1 times; avg:     3238us; total:     3238us
main.segmap_2902             ran     1 times; avg:      354us; total:      354us
main.segmap_intragroup_4151  ran     1 times; avg:     1431us; total:     1431us
main.segred_large_2030       ran     1 times; avg:      464us; total:      464us
main.segred_large_2297       ran     1 times; avg:     4392us; total:     4392us
main.segred_small_2060       ran     1 times; avg:      149us; total:      149us
map_transpose_f32_low_height ran     2 times; avg:       43us; total:       86us
replicate_5435               ran     1 times; avg:       11us; total:       11us
40 operations with cumulative runtime:  13669us

Same for the old version

$ futhark-0.15.8 opencl bfast.fut
$ gunzip -c data/sahara.in.gz | ./bfast -e main -P  > /dev/null
Peak memory usage for space 'device': 338209512 bytes.
copy_dev_to_dev              ran     4 times; avg:        9us; total:       36us
copy_2612                    ran     1 times; avg:       98us; total:       98us
map_transpose_f32            ran     1 times; avg:      468us; total:      468us
map_transpose_f32_low_height ran     1 times; avg:        8us; total:        8us
replicate_2557               ran     1 times; avg:        6us; total:        6us
scan_stage1_1117             ran     1 times; avg:      630us; total:      630us
scan_stage2_1117             ran     1 times; avg:        6us; total:        6us
scan_stage3_1117             ran     1 times; avg:      103us; total:      103us
segmap_1001                  ran     1 times; avg:        6us; total:        6us
segmap_1016                  ran     1 times; avg:        6us; total:        6us
segmap_1057                  ran     1 times; avg:      200us; total:      200us
segmap_1145                  ran     1 times; avg:      130us; total:      130us
segmap_1233                  ran     1 times; avg:       51us; total:       51us
segmap_1302                  ran     8 times; avg:      132us; total:     1061us
segmap_1322                  ran     8 times; avg:      153us; total:     1227us
segmap_1369                  ran     1 times; avg:      147us; total:      147us
segmap_1395                  ran     1 times; avg:     2332us; total:     2332us
segmap_1435                  ran     1 times; avg:      354us; total:      354us
segmap_960                   ran     1 times; avg:       25us; total:       25us
segmap_intragroup_1561       ran     1 times; avg:     1271us; total:     1271us
segmap_intragroup_1899       ran     1 times; avg:     1430us; total:     1430us
segred_small_1182            ran     1 times; avg:      164us; total:      164us
39 operations with cumulative runtime:   9759us

So, there are some intragroup kernels that are not being run in the new version. Let's figure out what the tuning tree looks like:

Threshold forest:
("main.suff_outer_par_5",False)
|
`- ("main.suff_intra_par_6",False)
   |
   +- ("main.suff_intra_par_12",False)
   |
   +- ("main.suff_outer_par_10",False)
   |
   +- ("main.suff_outer_par_15",False)
   |  |
   |  `- ("main.suff_outer_par_16",False)
   |
   +- ("main.suff_outer_par_8",False)
   |
   `- ("main.suff_outer_par_9",False)

That's strange, it's not actually a list, but an actual tree. Shouldn't incremental flattening always produce a list?

Anyway, there's something wrong with the autotuner. Here's the first few lines of debugging output:

Tuning main.suff_intra_par_12 on entry point main and dataset data/sahara.in
Running with options: -L --size=main.suff_intra_par_12=2000000000
Running executable "./bfast" with arguments ["-L","--size=main.suff_intra_par_12=2000000000","-e","main","-t","/tmp/futhark-bench13235-0","-r","10","-b"]
Got ePars:  8699904
Trying e_pars [8699904]
Running with options: -L --size=main.suff_intra_par_12=8699904
Running executable "./bfast" with arguments ["-L","--size=main.suff_intra_par_12=8699904","-e","main","-t","/tmp/futhark-bench13235-1","-r","10","-b"]
Tuning main.suff_outer_par_10 on entry point main and dataset data/sahara.in
Running with options: -L --size=main.suff_outer_par_10=2000000000 --size=main.suff_intra_par_12=2000000000
Running executable "./bfast" with arguments ["-L","--size=main.suff_outer_par_10=2000000000","--size=main.suff_intra_par_12=2000000000","-e","main","-t","/tmp/futhark-bench13235-2","-r","10","-b"]
Got ePars:  543744
Trying e_pars [543744]
Running with options: -L --size=main.suff_outer_par_10=543744 --size=main.suff_intra_par_12=2000000000
Running executable "./bfast" with arguments ["-L","--size=main.suff_outer_par_10=543744","--size=main.suff_intra_par_12=2000000000","-e","main","-t","/tmp/futhark-bench13235-3","-r","10","-b"]
Tuning main.suff_outer_par_16 on entry point main and dataset data/sahara.in
Running with options: -L --size=main.suff_outer_par_16=2000000000 --size=main.suff_outer_par_10=543744 --size=main.suff_intra_par_12=2000000000
Running executable "./bfast" with arguments ["-L","--size=main.suff_outer_par_16=2000000000","--size=main.suff_outer_par_10=543744","--size=main.suff_intra_par_12=2000000000","-e","main","-t","/tmp/futhark-bench13235-4","-r","10","-b"]
Got ePars:  4349952
Trying e_pars [4349952]
Running with options: -L --size=main.suff_outer_par_16=4349952 --size=main.suff_outer_par_10=543744 --size=main.suff_intra_par_12=2000000000
Running executable "./bfast" with arguments ["-L","--size=main.suff_outer_par_16=4349952","--size=main.suff_outer_par_10=543744","--size=main.suff_intra_par_12=2000000000","-e","main","-t","/tmp/futhark-bench13235-5","-r","10","-b"]
...

To tune correctly, we want to tune from the bottom of the tree upwards, but instead we start with suff_intra_par_12 which is somewhere in the middle? Ah, I guess all that just stems from the fact that we're not actually tuning a list, but a tree.

Here's the optimal tuning parameters that we'd like to see:

main.suff_outer_par_5=2000000000
main.suff_intra_par_6=20000000000
main.suff_intra_par_12=20000000000
main.suff_outer_par_10=2
main.suff_outer_par_15=20000000000
main.suff_outer_par_16=2
main.suff_outer_par_8=2
main.suff_outer_par_9=2000000000

Right off the bat, we can see that suff_outer_par_10 is being tuned incorrectly. Instead of being set low (to 543744), it's being maxed out. Oh, perhaps the default tuning parameters are not high enough?

It might also be that the default threshold is too small!

Well, that's a task for tomorrow.

Tomorrow

Continue with bfast.