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Add compile option to use single precision #119

Open GoogleCodeExporter opened 9 years ago

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
Some older versions of ADDA (before the public release) had an option to used 
single precision. But it was removed because CPU have been efficient with 
double precision already at that time. The only benefit of using single 
precision is less memory, which is not relevant in many practical simulations. 
And single precision can lead to much slower convergence of the iterative 
solver, when it is slow already with double precision.

However, ADDA is expected to be able to employ GPUs - issue 118. And currently 
many of them (especially the consumer-type) work much faster with single 
precision than with double. Also memory requirements are more stringent for 
GPUs, since fitting all the important data into the memory of GPU itself 
produces a large performance boost.

Changing between single and double precision should be a matter of changing 
definition of variables and replacing several floating-point functions, which 
have separate versions for floats and doubles. Definitions are best done with 
typedefs like "real" to be easily modified by defines in compile time. The 
latter can be done conveniently with macros in <tgmath.h> - a feature of C99. 
This feature is supported with recent version of gcc - 
http://gcc.gnu.org/c99status.html , but some library issues remain. Moreover, 
there may be issues with older versions of gcc or other compilers. 

Moreover, memory allocation functions also need to be checked for possible 
issues, especially a few functions provided by FFTW. Also floating point 
numerical constants are defined as double, by default. So it may be a good idea 
to redefine them as floats for single-precision version.

Another interesting idea is a hybrid single-double method, proposed by Evgenij 
Zubko (Penttila et al. J. Quant. Spectrosc. Radiat. Transfer 106, 417-436 
(2007). doi:10.1016/j.jqsrt.2007.01.026). All large arrays are allocated in 
single precision, while some (or all) of the scalar coefficients used in 
iterative methods are in double precision. This may improve the convergence of 
the iterative solver (to something in between the values for single and double 
precisions) at almost no extra memory cost (compared to purely single-precision 
version).

Original issue reported on code.google.com by yurkin on 2 Dec 2010 at 5:43

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago

Original comment by yurkin on 22 Apr 2011 at 2:41

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago

Original comment by yurkin on 28 Apr 2013 at 3:48

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago 
After issue 70 is solved, this one seems to be pretty straightforward. However, 
I plan to do it after issue 101, which by itself warrants a separate release.

Original comment by yurkin on 1 Aug 2013 at 12:16