amh-code VS highway

I recently stumbled on https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/ which I absolutely loved. It's really well written, comprehensible and concise. It felt like a pleasure to read which I find really rare with CS textbooks and I feel like I've come out of it understanding how computers work a bit better

Does anyone have any similar CS books they'd recommend? Ideally they'd be:

I admire Daniel Lemire’s work on SIMD implementations. [Lemire]

[Lemire] https://lemire.me/en/#publications

I learn a lot by reading my compiler’s and profiler’s documentation.

For Rust, the Rust Performance Book by Nicholas Nethercote et al. [Nethercote] seems like a nice place to start after reading the Cargo and rustc books.

[Nethercote] https://nnethercote.github.io/perf-book/

Algorithms for Modern Hardware by Sergey Slotin [Slotin] is a dense and approachable overview.

[Slotin] https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/

Quantitative understanding of the underlying implementations and computer architecture has been invaluable for me. Computer architecture: a quantitative approach by John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson [H&P] and Computer organization and design: the hardware/software interface by Patterson and Hennessy [P&H ARM, P&H RISC] are two introductory books I like the best. There are three editions of the second book: the ARM, MIPS and RISC-V editions.

[H&P] https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/cM8mDwAAQBAJ

Hello, recently I've enjoyed Casey Muratori's Performance-Aware Programming course[0]. You could read Algorithms for Modern Hardware[1] to learn similar set of stuff though. Casey's course is aimed at bringing beginners all the way to a nearly-industry-leading understanding of performance issues while the book assumes a bit more knowledge, but I think a lot of people have trouble getting into this stuff using a book if they don't have related experience.

I've also found Hacker's Delight Second Edition[2] to be a useful reference, and I really wish that I would get around to reading What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory[3] in full, because I end up reading a bunch of other things[4] to learn stuff that's surely in there.

[0]: https://www.computerenhance.com/p/welcome-to-the-performance...

[1]: https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/

[2]: https://github.com/lancetw/ebook-1/blob/80eccb7f59bf102586ba...

[3]: https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf

[4]: https://danluu.com/3c-conflict/

https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/ and http://0x80.pl/ have some stuff about this, but the latter can be dense. I've had fun getting my hands dirty with some problems at https://highload.fun/ but there's not much direction unless you go to the telegram chat and ask people questions.

Other fast binary searches https://github.com/sslotin/amh-code/tree/main/binsearch

The bf16 dot instruction replaces 6 instructions: https://github.com/google/highway/blob/master/hwy/ops/x86_12...

[0] for those interested in Highway.

It's also mentioned in [1], which starts off

> Today we're sharing open source code that can sort arrays of numbers about ten times as fast as the C++ std::sort, and outperforms state of the art architecture-specific algorithms, while being portable across all modern CPU architectures. Below we discuss how we achieved this.

[0] https://github.com/google/highway

[1] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/06/Vectorized%20and%2..., which has an associated paper at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.05982.pdf.

Thanks so much!

Everyone working on this self-selected into contributing, so I think of it less as my team than ... a team?

Specifically want to call out: Jan Wassenberg (author of https://github.com/google/highway) and I started gemma.cpp as a small project just a few months ago + Phil Culliton, Dan Zheng, and Paul Chang + of course the GDM Gemma team.

C++ users can enjoy Highway [1].

[1] https://github.com/google/highway/

At that point it is better to have some kind of DSL that should not be in the main language, because it would target a much lower level than a typical program. The best effort I've seen in this scene was Google's Highway [1] (not to be confused with HighwayHash) and I even once attempted to recreate it in Rust, but it is still distanced from my ideal.

[1] https://github.com/google/highway

Interesting, thanks for sharing :)

At the time we open-sourced Highway, the standardization process had already started and there were some discussions.

I'm curious why stdlib is the only path you see to default? Compare the activity level of https://github.com/VcDevel/std-simd vs https://github.com/google/highway. As to open-source usage, after years of std::experimental, I see <200 search hits [1], vs >400 for Highway [2], even after excluding several library users.

But that aside, I'm not convinced standardization is the best path for a SIMD library. We and external users extend Highway on a weekly basis as new use cases arise. What if we deferred those changes to 3-monthly meetings, or had to wait for one meeting per WD, CD, (FCD), DIS, (FDIS) stage before it's standardized? Standardization seems more useful for rarely-changing things.

1: https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+std::experim...

2: https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+HWY_NAMESPAC...

Thanks for the link. We were previously using GFNI for bit reversal and 8-bit shifts, and I just extended that to our 8-bit BroadcastSignBit (https://github.com/google/highway/pull/1784).

You could study Google's Highway library [1].

[1] https://github.com/google/highway

Runtime feature detection need not be rare nor hard, it's a few dozen lines of boilerplate. You can even write your code just once: see https://github.com/google/highway#examples.