Re: Auto-vectorization speeds up multiplication of large-precision numerics

Amit Khandekar <amitdkhan.pg@gmail.com>

From: Amit Khandekar <amitdkhan.pg@gmail.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2020-09-07T07:10:49Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Mon, 7 Sep 2020 at 11:23, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> I wrote:
> > I made some cosmetic changes to this and committed it.

Thanks!

>
> BTW, poking at this further, it seems that the patch only really
> works for gcc.  clang accepts the -ftree-vectorize switch, but
> looking at the generated asm shows that it does nothing useful.
> Which is odd, because clang does do loop vectorization.
>
> I tried adding -Rpass-analysis=loop-vectorize and got
>
> numeric.c:8341:3: remark: loop not vectorized: could not determine number of loop iterations [-Rpass-analysis=loop-vectorize]
>                 for (i2 = 0; i2 <= i; i2++)

Hmm, yeah that's unfortunate. My guess is that the compiler would do
vectorization only if 'i' is a constant, which is not true for our
case.

-- 
Thanks,
-Amit Khandekar
Huawei Technologies



Commits

  1. Use plain memset() in numeric.c, not MemSet and friends.

  2. Frob numeric.c loop so that clang will auto-vectorize it too.

  3. Apply auto-vectorization to the inner loop of numeric multiplication.

  4. Split Makefile symbol CFLAGS_VECTOR into two symbols.