What could cause a deterministic process to generate floating point errors

Question

Having already read this question I\'m reasonably certain that a given process using floating point arithmatic with the same input (on the same hardware, compiled with the s

Answer 1

If your program is parallelized, as it might be to run on a quad core, then it may well be non-deterministic.

Imagine that you have 4 processors adding a floating point value to the same memory location. Then you might get

(((InitialValue+P1fp)+P2fp)+P3fp)+P4fp

or

(((InitialValue+P2fp)+P3fp)+P1fp)+P4fp

or any of the other possible orderings.

Heck, you might even get

 InitialValue+(P2fp+P3fp)+(P1fp+P4fp)

if the compiler is good enough.

Unfortunately, floating point addition is not commutative or associative. Real number arithmetic is, but floating point is not, because of rounding, overflow, and underflow.

Because of this, parallel FP computation is often non-deterministic. "Often", because programs that look like

  on each processor
    while( there is work to do ) {
       get work
       calculate result
       add to total 
    }

will be non-deterministic, because the amount of time that each takes may vary widely - you can't predict the order of operations. (Worse if the threads interact.)

But not always, because there are styles of parallel programming that are deterministic.

Of course, what many folks who care about determinism do is work in integer or fixed point to avoid the problem. I am particularly fond of superaccumulators, 512, 1024, or 2048 bit numbers that floating point numbers can be added to, without suffering rounding errors.

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As for a single threaded application: the compiler may rearrange the code. Different compilations may give different answers. But any particular binary should be deterministic.

Unless... you are working in a dynamic language. That performs optimizatuions that reorder the FP computations, that vary over time.

Or unless... really long shot: Itanium had some features, like the ALAT, that made even single threaded coded non-deterministic. You are unlikely to be affected by these.