[cfe-dev] [test-suite] making polybench/symm succeed with "-Ofast" and "-ffp-contract=on"

[Hal Finkel via cfe-dev]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Renato Golin" <renato.golin at linaro.org>
> To: "Hal Finkel" <hfinkel at anl.gov>
> Cc: "Sebastian Paul Pop" <s.pop at samsung.com>, "llvm-dev" <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>, "Matthias Braun"
> <matze at braunis.de>, "Clang Dev" <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>, "nd" <nd at arm.com>, "Abe Skolnik" <a.skolnik at samsung.com>,
> "Sebastian Pop" <sebpop.llvm at gmail.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2016 9:16:39 AM
> Subject: Re: [test-suite] making polybench/symm succeed with "-Ofast" and "-ffp-contract=on"
> 
> On 12 October 2016 at 15:05, Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov> wrote:
> > This is something we need to understand. No, there's not always an
> > error bar. With FMA formation and without non-IEEE-compliant
> > optimizations (i.e. fast-math), the optimized answer should be
> > identical to the non-optimized answer.
> 
> What about architectures that this is never respected, like Darwin?
> 
> In the general case, indeed, optimisation levels should not change
> the
> IEEE representation and the tests should be deterministic.
> 
> But we can't guarantee this will always be the case.
> 
> 
> > We still do see cross-system discrepancies sometimes because of
> > differences in denormal handling, but on the same system that
> > should be consistent (aside, perhaps, from compiler-level
> > constant-folding issues).
> 
> But the test-suite doesn't run on a single system, nor it has one
> reference_output for each system.

I agree and understand, and we may need a tolerance in practice to deal with differences from denormal handling, etc. However, if Sebastian is seeing differences on the same system, we should understand why. Is he running on an ARM Darwin system, or an x86 using fp80 arithmetic, etc.? (Senastian?)

 -Hal

> 
> cheers,
> --renato
> 

-- 
Hal Finkel
Lead, Compiler Technology and Programming Languages
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory