Fast Reproducible Floating-Point Summation

Abstract

Reproducibility, i.e. getting the bitwise identical floating point results from multiple runs of the same program, is a property that many users depend on either for debugging or correctness checking in many codes [1]. However, the combination of dynamic scheduling of parallel computing resources, and floating point nonassociativity, make attaining reproducibility a challenge even for simple reduction operations like computing the sum of a vector of numbers in parallel. We propose a technique for floating point summation that is reproducible independent of the order of summation. Our technique uses Rump's algorithm for error-free vector transformation [2], and is much more efficient than using (possibly very) high precision arithmetic. Our algorithm trades off efficiency and accuracy: we reproducibly attain reasonably accurate results (with an absolute error bound c · n2 · macheps · max |vi| for a small constant c) with just 2n + O(1) floating-point operations, and quite accurate results (with an absolute error bound c · n3 · macheps2 · max |vi| with 5n + O(1) floating point operations, both with just two reduction operations. Higher accuracies are also possible by increasing the number of error-free transformations. As long as the same rounding mode is used, results computed by the proposed algorithms are reproducible for any run on any platform.