« Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout updated, EPUB added | Main | Floating Point Benchmark: Prolog Language Added »
Sunday, September 24, 2017
Floating Point Benchmark: PL/I Language Added
I have posted an update to my trigonometry-intense floating point benchmark which adds PL/I to the list of languages in which the benchmark is implemented. A new release of the benchmark collection including PL/I is now available for downloading. I have always had a fondness for PL/I. Sure, it was an archetypal product of IBM at the height of the supremacy of Big Blue, and overreached and never completely achieved its goals, but it was a product of the 1960s, when technological ambition imagined unifying programming languages as diverse as Fortran, COBOL, and Algol into a single language which would serve for all applications and run on platforms ranging from the most humble to what passed for supercomputers at the time. It was the choice for the development of Multics, one of the most ambitious operating system projects of all time (and, after its wave of enthusiasm broke on the shore of reality, inspired Unix), and the C language inherits much of its syntax and fundamentals from PL/I. Few people recall today, but the first version of AutoCAD shipped to customers was written in PL/I. When we were developing AutoCAD in 1982, we worked in parallel, using Digital Research's PL/I-80 (a subset of PL/I, but completely adequate for the needs of AutoCAD) on 8080/Z-80 CP/M systems and C on 8086/8088 machines. As it happened, AutoCAD-80, the PL/I version, shipped first, so the first customer who purchased AutoCAD received a version written in PL/I. The goal of PL/I was the grand unification of programming languages, which had bifurcated into a scientific thread exemplified by Fortran and variants of Algol and a commercial thread in which COBOL was dominant. The idea was that a single language, and a single implementation would serve for all, and that programmers working in a specific area could learn the subset applicable to their domain, ignoring features irrelevant to the tasks they programmed. By the standards of the time, the language feature set was ambitious. Variables could be declared in binary or decimal, fixed point or floating, with variable precision. Complex structures and arrays could be defined, including arrays of structures and structures containing arrays. A variety of storage classes were available, allowing the creation of dynamically or manually allocated storage, and access through pointers. Support for recursive procedures and reentrant code was included. The language was defined before the structured programming craze, but its control structures are adequate to permit structured programming should a programmer choose that style. Object orientation was undreamt of at the time, and support for it was added only much later. Iron Spring Software is developing a reasonably complete implementation of PL/I which runs on Linux and OS/2. It adheres to ANSI standard X3.74-1987 (ISO/IEC 6522:1992), the so-called “Subset G” of the language, but, in its present beta releases, does not support all features of the standard, The current state of the beta version is documented in the Programming Guide. With one exception (the ASIN mathematical builtin function), none of the missing features are required by the floating point benchmark, and ASIN is easily emulated by the identity (expressed in PL/I)asin(x) = atan(x, sqrt(1 − (x * x)))
implemented as a procedure in the program. The Iron Spring PL/I compiler is closed source, and will be offered for sale upon general release, but during the beta period downloads are free. The runtime libraries (much of which are written in PL/I) are open source and licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). There are no restrictions or licenses required to redistribute programs compiled by the compiler and linked with its libraries. This version of the benchmark was developed using the 0.9.9b beta release of the Iron Spring PL/I compiler. Current Linux downloads are 32-bit binaries and produce 32-bit code, but work on 64-bit systems such as the one on which I tested it. It is possible that a native 64-bit version of the compiler and libraries might outperform 32-bit code run in compatibility mode, but there is no way at present to test this. The PL/I implementation of Fbench is a straightforward port derived from the Ada version of the program, using the same imperative style of programming and global variables. All floating point values are declared as FLOAT BINARY(49), which maps into IEEE double-precision (64 bit) floating point. As noted above, the missing ASIN (arc sine) builtin function was emulated by an internal procedure named l_asin to avoid conflict with the builtin on compilers which supply it. Development of the program was straightforward, and after I recalled the idioms of a language in which I hadn't written code for more than thirty years, the program basically worked the first time. Support for the PUT STRING facility allowed making the program self-check its results without any need for user interaction. To avoid nonstandard system-dependent features, the iteration count for the benchmark is compiled into the program. After I get the benchmark running and have confirmed that it produces the correct values, I then time it with an modest iteration count, then adjust the iteration count to obtain a run time of around five minutes, which minimises start-up and termination effects and accurately reflects execution speed of the heart of the benchmark. Next, I run the benchmark five times on an idle system, record the execution times, compute the mean value, and from that calculate the time in microseconds per iteration. This is then compared with the same figure from runs of the C reference implementation of the benchmark to obtain the relative speed of the language compared to C. When I first performed this process, it was immediately apparent that something had seriously gang agley. The C version of the benchmark ran at 1.7858 microseconds per iteration, while the PL/I implementation took an aching 95.1767 microseconds/iteration—fully 53 times slower! This was, in its own way, a breathtaking result. Most compiled languages come in between somewhere between the speed of C and four times slower, with all of the modern heavy-hitter languages (Fortran, Pascal, Swift, Rust, Java, Haskell, Scala, Ada, and Go) benchmarking no slower than 1.5 times the C run time. Most interpreted languages (Perl, Python, Ruby) still benchmark around twice as fast as this initial PL/I test. It was time to start digging into the details. First of all, I made sure that all of the floating point variables were properly defined and didn't, for example, declare variables as fixed decimal. When I tried this with the COBOL version of the benchmark, I indeed got a comparable execution time (46 times slower than C). But the variables were declared correctly, and examination of the assembly language listing of the code generated by the compiler confirmed that it was generating proper in-line floating-point instructions instead of some horror such as calling library routines for floating point arithmetic. Next, I instrumented the program to verify that I hadn't blundered and somehow made it execute more iterations of the inner loop than were intended. I hadn't. This was becoming quite the mystery. It was time to take a deeper look under the hood. I downloaded, built, and installed OProfile, a hardware-supported statistical profiling tool which, without support by the language (which is a good thing, because the PL/I compiler doesn't provide any) allows measurement of the frequency of instruction execution within a program run under its supervision. I ran the benchmark for five minutes under OProfile:
operf ./fbench
(because the profiling process uses restricted kernel calls, this must be done as the super-user), and then annotated the results with:
opannotate --source --assembly fbench >fbench.prof The results were flabbergasting. I was flabber-aghast to discover that in the entire five minute run, only 5.6% of the time was spent in my benchmark program: all the rest was spent in system libraries! Looking closer, one of the largest time sinks was the PL/I EXP builtin function, which was distinctly odd, since the program never calls this function. I looked at the generated assembly code and discovered, however, that if you use the normal PL/I or Fortran idiom of “x ** 2” to square a value, rather than detecting the constant integer exponent and compiling the equivalent code of “x * x”, the compiler was generating a call to the general exponential function, able to handle arbitrary floating point exponents. I rewrote the three instances in the program where the “**” operator appeared to use multiplication, and when I re-ran the benchmark it was almost ten times faster (9.4 times to be precise)! Examination of the Oprofile output from this version showed that 44% of the time was spent in the benchmark, compared to 5.6% before, with the rest divided mostly among the mathematical library builtin functions used by the program. Many of the library functions which chewed up time in the original version were consequences of the calls on EXP and melted away when it was replaced by multiplication. Further experiments showed that these library functions, most written in PL/I, were not particularly efficient: replacing the builtin ATAN function with my own implementation ported from the INTRIG version of the C benchmark sped up the benchmark by another 6%. But the goal of the benchmark is to test the compiler and its libraries as supplied by the vendor, not to rewrite the libraries to tweak the results, so I set this version aside and proceeded with timing tests. I ran the PL/I benchmark for 29,592,068 iterations and obtained the following run times in seconds for five runs (299.23, 300.59, 298.52, 300.94, 298.07). These runs give a mean time of 299.47 seconds, or 10.1209 microseconds per iteration. I then ran the C benchmark for 166,051,660 iterations, yielding run times of (296.89, 296.37, 296.29, 296.76, 296.37) seconds, with mean 296.536, for 1.7858 microseconds per iteration. Dividing these gives a PL/I run time of 5.667 longer than that of C. In other words, for this benchmark, PL/I runs around 5.7 times slower than C. This is toward the low end of compiled languages in which the benchmark has been implemented. Among those tested so far, it falls between ALGOL 60 (3.95 times C) and GNU Common Lisp (compiled, 7.41 times C), and it is more than twice as fast as Micro Focus Visual COBOL in floating point mode (12.5 times C). It should be remembered, however, that this is a beta test compiler under active development, and that optimisation is often addressed after full implementation of the language. And since the libraries are largely written in PL/I, any optimisation of compiler-generated code will improve library performance as well. The lack of optimisation of constant integer exponents which caused the initial surprise in timing tests will, one hopes, be addressed in a subsequent release of the compiler. Further, the second largest consumer of time in the benchmark, after the main program itself with 44%, was the ATAN function, with 23.6%. But the ATAN function is only used to emulate the ASIN builtin, which isn't presently implemented. If and when an ASIN function is provided, and if its implementation is more efficient (for example, using a Maclaurin series) than my emulation, a substantial increase in performance will be possible. Nothing inherent in the PL/I language limits its performance. Equivalent code, using the same native data types, should be able to run as fast as C or Fortran, and mature commercial compilers from IBM and other vendors have demonstrated this performance but at a price. The Iron Spring compiler is a promising effort to deliver a professional quality PL/I compiler for personal computers at an affordable price (and, in its present beta test incarnation, for free). The relative performance of the various language implementations (with C taken as 1) is as follows. All language implementations of the benchmark listed below produced identical results to the last (11th) decimal place.
| Language | Relative Time |
Details |
|---|---|---|
| C | 1 | GCC 3.2.3 -O3, Linux |
| Visual Basic .NET | 0.866 | All optimisations, Windows XP |
| FORTRAN | 1.008 | GNU Fortran (g77) 3.2.3 -O3, Linux |
| Pascal | 1.027 1.077 |
Free Pascal 2.2.0 -O3, Linux GNU Pascal 2.1 (GCC 2.95.2) -O3, Linux |
| Swift | 1.054 | Swift 3.0.1, -O, Linux |
| Rust | 1.077 | Rust 0.13.0, --release, Linux |
| Java | 1.121 | Sun JDK 1.5.0_04-b05, Linux |
| Visual Basic 6 | 1.132 | All optimisations, Windows XP |
| Haskell | 1.223 | GHC 7.4.1-O2 -funbox-strict-fields, Linux |
| Scala | 1.263 | Scala 2.12.3, OpenJDK 9, Linux |
| Ada | 1.401 | GNAT/GCC 3.4.4 -O3, Linux |
| Go | 1.481 | Go version go1.1.1 linux/amd64, Linux |
| Simula | 2.099 | GNU Cim 5.1, GCC 4.8.1 -O2, Linux |
| Lua | 2.515 22.7 |
LuaJIT 2.0.3, Linux Lua 5.2.3, Linux |
| Python | 2.633 30.0 |
PyPy 2.2.1 (Python 2.7.3), Linux Python 2.7.6, Linux |
| Erlang | 3.663 9.335 |
Erlang/OTP 17, emulator 6.0, HiPE [native, {hipe, [o3]}] Byte code (BEAM), Linux |
| ALGOL 60 | 3.951 | MARST 2.7, GCC 4.8.1 -O3, Linux |
| PL/I | 5.667 | Iron Spring PL/I 0.9.9b beta, Linux |
| Lisp | 7.41 19.8 |
GNU Common Lisp 2.6.7, Compiled, Linux GNU Common Lisp 2.6.7, Interpreted |
| Smalltalk | 7.59 | GNU Smalltalk 2.3.5, Linux |
| Forth | 9.92 | Gforth 0.7.0, Linux |
| COBOL | 12.5 46.3 |
Micro Focus Visual COBOL 2010, Windows 7 Fixed decimal instead of computational-2 |
| Algol 68 | 15.2 | Algol 68 Genie 2.4.1 -O3, Linux |
| Perl | 23.6 | Perl v5.8.0, Linux |
| Ruby | 26.1 | Ruby 1.8.3, Linux |
| JavaScript | 27.6 39.1 46.9 |
Opera 8.0, Linux Internet Explorer 6.0.2900, Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6, Linux |
| QBasic | 148.3 | MS-DOS QBasic 1.1, Windows XP Console |
| Mathematica | 391.6 | Mathematica 10.3.1.0, Raspberry Pi 3, Raspbian |
Posted at September 24, 2017 15:17