sb-simd

System requirements

SB-SIMD supports MMX/SSE operations on x86 hardware. AltiVec volunteers welcome.

Quick start

SB-SIMD is rather easy to install; but it does require compiling and installing SBCL. Here's how to proceed.

Download, compile, and install the patched SBCL sources.

Go to sbcl/simd.git and download a snapshot or clone the repository.
Read sbcl/INSTALL or this page.
The simplest procedure is
> cd path/to/sbcl > ./make.sh > su $ sh install.sh

Download and compile the SB-SIMD user library.

Go to sb-simd.git and download a snapshot or clone the repository.
Register SB-SIMD with SBCL's ASDF system.
> ln -s path/to/sb-simd/sb-simd.asd ~/.sbcl/systems
Generate the VOPS file
CL-USER> (load "generate-sse-vops.lisp") CL-USER> (gen-vops-to-file "sse-vops.lisp")
Run ASDF.
CL-USER> (asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :sb-simd)

Try the examples.

CL-USER> (load "example-test.lisp") CL-USER> (test-foo) CL-USER> (test-2) CL-USER> (test-sign) CL-USER> CL-USER> (load "timing.lisp") CL-USER> (load "test-matrix.lisp") CL-USER> (test-matrix 100000)

To mirror the sb-simd project,

rsync -a common-lisp.net::project/sb-simd sb-simd

Supported SSE instructions

See here

SSE VOPs

Some VOPs are available, see sse-*.lisp at cvs. (And test-*.lisp for examples). Use at your own risk.

TODO

SBCL errors if VOP returns (:SCS (XMM-REG)), define-move-vop's are apparently not enough..
Add guards to vops
Add index bounds checks to vops
Make sbcl disassembler aware of new instructions
Make CL versions of VOP's and get rid of sb-sys:%primitive -calls
Documentation?
More higher-level simd ops
..

Performance

Running SBCL version 0.9.3 + patch on Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz (arch X86)

Test	Typed CL	SSE	Ratio TypedCL:SSE
Matrix 3x3 mul, 10M ops	8.31 +- 0.02 sec	1.50 +- 0.03 sec	5.5 : 1
Seq=, two equal 256kb simple-array-ub-8	137 +- 2 MBytes/sec	3340 +- 6 MBytes/sec	1 : 24

Unless stated otherwise, values are avg of 10 samples, and +- is std dev.

References

Mailing List

sb-simd-devel

History

Christophe Rhodes announced the first code to sbcl-devel on 2001-10-12.
Risto Laakso started the SB-SIMD project on common-lisp.net around August 5, 2005.
Daniel Herring found SB-SIMD around July 27, 2007.

SB-SIMD