Details:
- Modified .travis.yml to automatically test the mixed-datatype support
of the gemm operation, with supporting changes to common.mk, the
top-level Makefile, and travis/do_testsuite.sh.
- Added a new pair of input files to testsuite directory with the
'.mixed' suffix (similar to those with the '.fast' suffix) for testing
mixed-datatype gemm.
- Updated docs/BuildSystem.md to document the new make targets
'testblis-md' and 'checkblis-md'.
Details:
- Added python version checking to configure script. (Recall that python
is needed to execute the flatten-headers.py script.) Minimum versions
of python needed are currently as follows:
python2: 2.7 or later
python3: 3.5 or later
The standard search order for python interpeters is:
python python3 python2
The PYTHON environment variable is also supported and will be checked
before the standard search order list.
- Updated BuildSystem.md to include: a minimum make version; mention
that the C compiler must actually be a C99 compiler; and the caveat
that Windows builds do not require pthreads since BLIS can provide
an implementation of pthreads internally.
Details:
- Defined a new level-1d operation called 'shiftd', including object and
typed APIs. This operation adds a scalar value to every element along
an arbitrary diagonal of a matrix. Currently, shiftd is implemented in
terms of the addv kernel. (The scalar is passed in as the x vector
with an increment of zero.)
- Replaced ad-hoc usage of setd and addd (after creating a temporary
matrix object) with use of shiftd, which is much more concise, in
various test driver files in the testsuite. Similar changes were made
to the standalone test drivers and the example code.
- Added documentation entries in BLISObjectAPI.md and BLISTypedAPI.md
for bli_shiftd() and bli_?shiftd(), respectively.
- Added observed object properties to level-1d documentation in
BLISObjectAPI.md.
Details:
- Implemented support for gemm where A, B, and C may have different
storage datatypes, as well as a computational precision (and implied
computation domain) that may be different from the storage precision
of either A or B. This results in 128 different combinations, all
which are implemented within this commit. (For now, the mixed-datatype
functionality is only supported via the object API.) If desired, the
mixed-datatype support may be disabled at configure-time.
- Added a memory-intensive optimization to certain mixed-datatype cases
that requires a single m-by-n matrix be allocated (temporarily) per
call to gemm. This optimization aims to avoid the overhead involved in
repeatedly updating C with general stride, or updating C after a
typecast from the computation precision. This memory optimization may
be disabled at configure-time (provided that the mixed-datatype
support is enabled in the first place).
- Added support for testing mixed-datatype combinations to testsuite.
The user may test gemm with mixed domains, precisions, both, or
neither.
- Added a standalone test driver directory for building and running
mixed-datatype performance experiments.
- Defined a new variation of castm, castnzm, which operates like castm
except that imaginary values are not touched when casting a real
operand to a complex operand. (By contrast, in these situations castm
sets the imaginary components of the destination matrix to zero.)
- Defined bli_obj_imag_is_zero() and substituted calls in lieu of all
usages of bli_obj_imag_equals() that tested against BLIS_ZERO, and
also simplified the implementation of bli_obj_imag_equals().
- Fixed bad behavior from bli_obj_is_real() and bli_obj_is_complex()
when given BLIS_CONSTANT objects.
- Disabled dt_on_output field in auxinfo_t structure as well as all
accessor functions. Also commented out all usage of accessor
functions within macrokernels. (Typecasting in the microkernel is
still feasible, though probably unrealistic for now given the
additional complexity required.)
- Use void function pointer type (instead of void*) for storing function
pointers in bli_l0_fpa.c.
- Added documentation for using gemm with mixed datatypes in
docs/MixedDatatypes.md and example code in examples/oapi/11gemm_md.c.
- Defined level-1d operation xpbyd and level-1m operation xpbym.
- Added xpbym test module to testsuite.
- Updated frame/include/bli_x86_asm_macros.h with additional macros
(courtsey of Devin Matthews).
Details:
- Updated the build system so that "lesser" Makefiles, such as those in
belonging to example code or the testsuite, may be run even if the
directory is orphaned from the original build tree. This allows a
user to configure, compile, and install BLIS, delete the build tree
(that is, the source distribution, or the build directory for out-
of-tree builds) and then compile example or testsuite code and link
against the installed copy of BLIS (provided the example or testsuite
directory was preserved or obtained from another source). The only
requirement is that make be invoked while setting the
BLIS_INSTALL_PATH variable to the same installation prefix used when
BLIS was configured. The easiest syntax is:
make BLIS_INSTALL_PATH=/install/prefix
though it's also permissible to set BLIS_INSTALL_PATH as an
environment variable prior to running 'make'.
- Updated all lesser Makefiles to implement the new aforementioned build
behavior.
- Relocated check-blastest.sh and check-blistest.sh from build to
blastest and testsuite, respectively, so that if those directories are
copied elsewhere the user can still run 'make check' locally.
- Updated docs/Testsuite.md with language that mentions this new option
of building/linking against an installed copy of BLIS.
Details:
- The docs/ConfigurationHowTo.md document was written with examples that
did not yet contain the skx sub-configuration, but the previous commit
included bli_arch.c code copied and pasted from a recent commit that
does support skx. To keep things consistent, I've removed skx from the
recently-added ConfigurationHowTo.md code snippet.
Details:
- Added missing language directing the reader to modify the config_name
string array in bli_arch.c when adding a new sub-configuration. Thanks
to Devangi Parikh for reporting this missing section.
Details:
- Redefined the 'test' make target in the top-level Makefile so that the
final result ("everything passed" or at "least one failure") is echoed
to stdout. Note that 'check' is unchanged, and thus is now effectively
a fast version of 'test'.
- Updated docs/BuildSystem.md to reflect the above change.
Details:
- Updated the typed and object APIs to include language on the rntm_t
parameters in the expert interfaces.
- Updated README to include link to object API.
Details:
- Modified a few sections to take advantage of a feature of markdown
that allows a bullet or enumeration to have multiple paragraphs. This
is a trial run to make sure the indentation looks good when rendered
in a web browser.
Details:
- Filled in remaining section on object creation function reference
of BLISObjectAPI.md. All object management functions demonstrated as
part of the example code in examples/oapi are now documented, as well
as some other functions that are not shown in the example code.
- Updated variuos links (mostly in function index) to correctly point to
the object API reference instead of the typed API reference.
- Added documentation to getijm, setijm.
Details:
- Defined a new struct datatype, rntm_t (runtime), to house the thrloop
field of the cntx_t (context). The thrloop array holds the number of
ways of parallelism (thread "splits") to extract per level-3
algorithmic loop until those values can be used to create a
corresponding node in the thread control tree (thrinfo_t structure),
which (for any given level-3 invocation) usually happens by the time
the macrokernel is called for the first time.
- Relocating the thrloop from the cntx_t remedies a thread-safety issue
when invoking level-3 operations from two or more application threads.
The race condition existed because the cntx_t, a pointer to which is
usually queried from the global kernel structure (gks), is supposed to
be a read-only. However, the previous code would write to the cntx_t's
thrloop field *after* it had been queried, thus violating its read-only
status. In practice, this would not cause a problem when a sequential
application made a multithreaded call to BLIS, nor when two or more
application threads used the same parallelization scheme when calling
BLIS, because in either case all application theads would be using
the same ways of parallelism for each loop. The true effects of the
race condition were limited to situations where two or more application
theads used *different* parallelization schemes for any given level-3
call.
- In remedying the above race condition, the application or calling
library can now specify the parallelization scheme on a per-call basis.
All that is required is that the thread encode its request for
parallelism into the rntm_t struct prior to passing the address of the
rntm_t to one of the expert interfaces of either the typed or object
APIs. This allows, for example, one application thread to extract 4-way
parallelism from a call to gemm while another application thread
requests 2-way parallelism. Or, two threads could each request 4-way
parallelism, but from different loops.
- A rntm_t* parameter has been added to the function signatures of most
of the level-3 implementation stack (with the most notable exception
being packm) as well as all level-1v, -1d, -1f, -1m, and -2 expert
APIs. (A few internal functions gained the rntm_t* parameter even
though they currently have no use for it, such as bli_l3_packm().)
This required some internal calls to some of those functions to
be updated since BLIS was already using those operations internally
via the expert interfaces. For situations where a rntm_t object is
not available, such as within packm/unpackm implementations, NULL is
passed in to the relevant expert interfaces. This is acceptable for
now since parallelism is not obtained for non-level-3 operations.
- Revamped how global parallelism is encoded. First, the conventional
environment variables such as BLIS_NUM_THREADS and BLIS_*_NT are only
read once, at library initialization. (Thanks to Nathaniel Smith for
suggesting this to avoid repeated calls getenv(), which can be slow.)
Those values are recorded to a global rntm_t object. Public APIs, in
bli_thread.c, are still available to get/set these values from the
global rntm_t, though now the "set" functions have additional logic
to ensure that the values are set in a synchronous manner via a mutex.
If/when NULL is passed into an expert API (meaning the user opted to
not provide a custom rntm_t), the values from the global rntm_t are
copied to a local rntm_t, which is then passed down the function stack.
Calling a basic API is equivalent to calling the expert APIs with NULL
for the cntx and rntm parameters, which means the semantic behavior of
these basic APIs (vis-a-vis multithreading) is unchanged from before.
- Renamed bli_cntx_set_thrloop_from_env() to bli_rntm_set_ways_for_op()
and reimplemented, with the function now being able to treat the
incoming rntm_t in a manner agnostic to its origin--whether it came
from the application or is an internal copy of the global rntm_t.
- Removed various global runtime APIs for setting the number of ways of
parallelism for individual loops (e.g. bli_thread_set_*_nt()) as well
as the corresponding "get" functions. The new model simplifies these
interfaces so that one must either set the total number of threads, OR
set all of the ways of parallelism for each loop simultaneously (in a
single function call).
- Updated sandbox/ref99 according to above changes.
- Rewrote/augmented docs/Multithreading.md to document the three methods
(and two specific ways within each method) of requesting parallelism
in BLIS.
- Removed old, disabled code from bli_l3_thrinfo.c.
- Whitespace changes to code (e.g. bli_obj.c) and docs/BuildSystem.md.
Details:
- Added documentation to docs/BLISObjectAPI.md for a handful of
commonly-used obj_t accessor functions.
- Minor updates to docs/BLISTypedAPI.md.
Details:
- Deleted some lines from the API function signatures that did not
belong (and were only left over from the copy-paste of the typed API).
- Fixed some paragraph-in-bullet indentation.
Details:
- Added first draft of BLISObjectAPI.md. (Object management section is
still missing.)
- Small fixes to BLISTypedAPI.md found while writing BLISObjectAPI.md.
- In various .md files, changed ``` verbatim blocks to language
attributes (e.g. ```c for C code).
Details:
- Added missing pthreads library linking to example makefile in
docs/BuildSystem.md, as well as similar language to build requirements
at the beginning of the document. Thanks to Stefanos Mavros for
bringing this to our attention.
- Updated CREDITS file.
Details:
- Minor updates to BLISTypedAPI.md, mostly to bring terminology
up-to-date with the new "typed API" classification.
- Added contents section to KernelsHowTo.md.
Details:
- Added missing level-1v operations to BLISTypedAPI (e.g. axpbyv,
xpbyv).
- Updated broken linkes in KernelsHowTo.md based on misnamed anchors.
- Other minor changes.
Details:
- Within the documents in docs/*.md, reverted links to other local
documents to relative paths.
- Fixed some links/documents that did not yet have the '.md' suffix.
- Testing whether we can use relative links ('docs/BLISTypedAPI.md')
from within README.md.
Details:
- Updated most markdown links in the documents/wikis to use absolute
paths instead of the relative paths that were in use previously.
A few links were not updated, except for adding a ".md" to reflect
the documents' new names, in order to test whether relative
linking still works.
Details:
- Exported all github wikis to a new 'docs' directory.
- Renamed 'BLISAPIQuickReference' wiki to 'BLISTypedAPI' and removed
all cntx_t* arguments from the (now non-expert) APIs (with the
exception of the kernel APIs).
- Added section to BuildSystem documenting new ARG_MAX hack.
