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sarah-quinones / faer-rs

Linear algebra foundation for the Rust programming language
https://faer-rs.github.io
MIT License
1.82k stars 61 forks source link

JOSS paper: copy edits #153

Open jedbrown opened 1 week ago

jedbrown commented 1 week ago

This mostly fixes some citing/bib ([@label] is special syntax). I introduced the "JIT" acronym at first use, though it could be reworded elsewhere.

Is it worth mentioning libxsmm since your nano-gemm implementation is surprisingly competitive without JIT? I don't know how to square that with mediocre performance at very small sizes in the figures here.

Should the mention of sparse matrix support be updated to reflect that it exists (perhaps in immature form) while still being out of scope for this paper?

https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/6099

jedbrown commented 1 week ago

One other optional comment about Rust is its noalias by default, where C requires restrict and C++ doesn't even have that (in the standard). This is often a substantial performance benefit in numerical code (especially when using AD), and it's hard to safely use restrict to the same degree (also as evidenced by LLVM noalias bugs being exposed by Rust nalgebra).

sarah-quinones commented 1 week ago

thanks a bunch!

the figures are from before nanogemm was a thing. there have been some good perf improvements since then

i think mentioning the sparse algorithms can't hurt

one thing about the noalias part is that faer can't really make use of it, because matrices are implemented as pointers. there are some places where i convert to slices before i do the math to get noalias annotations, but rustc currently doesn't propagate the annotations to llvm in some cases

jedbrown commented 1 week ago

Would you mind updating the figures for nanogemm?

Regarding noalias, I was thinking as much of the caller's code, though I also wouldn't say a missed optimization in rustc/LLVM negates the benefit of making it safe to maximize noalias in the programming model (though tangible performance impact may be waiting for that compiler improvement). This may well be too far in the weeds for the paper.

sarah-quinones commented 1 week ago

i don't know if i still have the benchmark code. i lost some data on my pc recently, but i'll check if i have a backup somewhere

sarah-quinones commented 1 week ago

nvm i put it on github