Philip Reames
2012-Jun-29 03:13 UTC
[LLVMdev] Reasoning about Floating Point in Optimizations
Good evening all, Inspired by http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=3299, I've spent the last few hours looking at various test cases involving float point variables in loops and trying to identify some of our short comings on the optimization front. Before I go any further, I want to share my findings with the community and ask for feedback on how best to approach this. Essentially, the motivating examples are things like these two: void func() { // this loop does not get pruned for (float i = 0.0f; i < 1000.0f; i += 1.2f) { } } int foo3() { // this loop does not get pruned for(int i = 0; i < 1000.0f; i++) { } return 0; } When the IR is generated and optimized, we are currently unable to recognize these as fixed trip count loops. As such, we do not optimize them away. If we extend the second example to compute a running sum of the indexes, we aren't able to recognize that constant calculation either. (We do both optimizations if the upper bound constant is converted to an integer in the second loop.) Looking into this, I discovered two sets of possible issues: 1) InstCombine does not take advantage of instruction sequences in which a variable integer is converted to a float and then immediate compared to a floating point constant. In many cases, these can be converted to an integer comparison. %conv = sitofp i32 %0 to float %cmp = fcmp olt float %conv, 1.000000e+03 2) ScalarEvolution is completely ignorant of floating point values and doesn't recognize fixed (or even bounded) trip counts. The end result of this is that the loop appears possible infinite to loop-deletion and can't be safely deleted. The general approach I'm considering is to introduce a series of transformation in InstCombine based on the sitofp/fcmp(const) pattern and to extend SCEV to be FP aware. The first part doesn't worry me too much - though I will want a careful review from someone more familiar with FP semantics than myself - but the second one I'm unsure of. Is this the right approach to be taking? Or is there a better way to address this problem? Note: I'm working off the head of SVN as of around 6pm. Note 2: I don't have any personal stake in this topic, I just grabbed it as an interesting case to investigate. If someone is already looking at this, let me know, I'll go find something else to work on. Yours, Philip Reames
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