Haskell math performance on multiply-add operation

Question

I\'m writing a game in Haskell, and my current pass at the UI involves a lot of procedural generation of geometry. I am currently focused on identifying performance of one parti

Answer 1

Roman Leschinkskiy responds:

Actually, the core looks mostly ok to me. Using unsafeIndex instead of (!) makes the program more than twice as fast (see my answer above). The program below is much faster, though (and cleaner, IMO). I suspect the remaining difference between this and the C program is due to GHC's general suckiness when it comes to floating point. The HEAD produces the best results with the NCG and -msse2

First, define a new Vec4 data type:

{-# LANGUAGE BangPatterns #-}

import Data.Vector.Storable
import qualified Data.Vector.Storable as V
import Foreign
import Foreign.C.Types

-- Define a 4 element vector type
data Vec4 = Vec4 {-# UNPACK #-} !CFloat
                 {-# UNPACK #-} !CFloat
                 {-# UNPACK #-} !CFloat
                 {-# UNPACK #-} !CFloat

Ensure we can store it in an array

instance Storable Vec4 where
  sizeOf _ = sizeOf (undefined :: CFloat) * 4
  alignment _ = alignment (undefined :: CFloat)

  {-# INLINE peek #-}
  peek p = do
             a <- peekElemOff q 0
             b <- peekElemOff q 1
             c <- peekElemOff q 2
             d <- peekElemOff q 3
             return (Vec4 a b c d)
    where
      q = castPtr p
  {-# INLINE poke #-}
  poke p (Vec4 a b c d) = do
             pokeElemOff q 0 a
             pokeElemOff q 1 b
             pokeElemOff q 2 c
             pokeElemOff q 3 d
    where
      q = castPtr p

Values and methods on this type:

a = Vec4 0.2 0.1 0.6 1.0
m = Vec4 0.99 0.7 0.8 0.6

add :: Vec4 -> Vec4 -> Vec4
{-# INLINE add #-}
add (Vec4 a b c d) (Vec4 a' b' c' d') = Vec4 (a+a') (b+b') (c+c') (d+d')

mult :: Vec4 -> Vec4 -> Vec4
{-# INLINE mult #-}
mult (Vec4 a b c d) (Vec4 a' b' c' d') = Vec4 (a*a') (b*b') (c*c') (d*d')

vsum :: Vec4 -> CFloat
{-# INLINE vsum #-}
vsum (Vec4 a b c d) = a+b+c+d

multList :: Int -> Vector Vec4 -> Vector Vec4
multList !count !src
    | count <= 0    = src
    | otherwise     = multList (count-1) $ V.map (\v -> add (mult v m) a) src

main = do
    print $ Data.Vector.Storable.sum
          $ Data.Vector.Storable.map vsum
          $ multList repCount
          $ Data.Vector.Storable.replicate arraySize (Vec4 0 0 0 0)

repCount, arraySize :: Int
repCount = 10000
arraySize = 20000

With ghc 6.12.1, -O2 -fasm:

• 1.752

With ghc HEAD (june 26), -O2 -fasm -msse2

• 1.708

This looks like the most idiomatic way to write a Vec4 array, and gets the best performance (11x faster than your original). (And this might become a benchmark for GHC's LLVM backend)