BLAST

BLAST (BLAS Templates) is a high-performance linear algebra library that combines a BLAS-like interface with modern C++ template metaprogramming. BLAST implementation is single-threaded and intended for matrices of small and medium size (a few hundred rows/columns), which is common for embedded control applications.

The figures below shows the performance of BLAS dgemm routine for different LA implementations on an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9850H CPU @ 2.60GHz:

C++ standard and compilers

BLAST uses C++20 standrd, so you need to use a compiler that supports it.

The code performance highly depends on the compiler. We recommend Clang.

Installing dependencies

• CMake 3.24 or higher.
• Boost libraries sudo apt install libboost-exception-dev.
• Blaze 3.9 or higher https://bitbucket.org/blaze-lib/blaze.
• BLASFEO https://github.com/giaf/blasfeo (optional, only if BLAST_WITH_BLASFEO is selected). Select a proper target architecture by setting the TARGET variable in Makefile.rule or in CMake. Build and install as usual. The build system searches for BLASFEO in /opt/blasfeo by default.
• Google Test https://github.com/google/googletest must be installed and findable by the CMake build system (optional, only if BLAST_WITH_TEST is selected).

If you want to run benchmarks, you will also need:

• Google Benchmark https://github.com/google/benchmark must be installed and findable by the CMake build system (optional, only if BLAST_WITH_BENCHMARK is selected).
• Eigen3 3.3.7 or higher (optional, if you want to benchmark it).
• For each installed BLAS library such as MKL, OpenBLAS, etc. a separate benchmark executable will be built, if it is found by CMake FindBLAS.
• Python3 sudo apt install python3
• Matplotlib sudo apt install python3-matplotlib

Building

BLAST is a header-only library, so you don’t need to build it. You can however build the tests:

1. Install the dependencies.
2. Assuming that you are in the blast source root, do

    mkdir build && cd build
    

1. Run CMake

cmake -DBLAST_WITH_TEST=ON ..

1. Build

make -j 10

1. Run tests

ctest

Using

TODO: add examples

Benchmarks

Either use

cmake -C cmake/InitialCache.cmake ..

that has all the right variables set up or specify BLAST_WITH_BENCHMARK=ON in CMake configure steps if you want to build benchmarks. The following CMake variables must be switched ON to enable specific benchmarks:

• BLAST_BUILD_BLAST_BENCHMARK
• BLAST_BUILD_LIBXSMM_BENCHMARK
• BLAST_BUILD_BLAS_BENCHMARK
• BLAST_BUILD_BLAZE_BENCHMARK
• BLAST_BUILD_EIGEN_BENCHMARK
• BLAS_BUILD_BLASFEO_BENCHMARK

For the BLASFEO benchmark, you also need to set BLAST_WITH_BLASFEO=ON.

Benchmarks will be built in build/bin/bench-*. The set of benchmarks depends on the options and the installed libraries. It might look like the following:

$ls -1 build/bin/bench*
build/bin/bench-blas-Intel10_64_dyn
build/bin/bench-blas-Intel10_64lp_seq
build/bin/bench-blas-OpenBLAS
build/bin/bench-blasfeo
build/bin/bench-blast
build/bin/bench-blaze
build/bin/bench-blazefeo
build/bin/bench-eigen
build/bin/bench-libxsmm

Here bench-blast is the benchmark for BLAST itself, and the others are for other libraries. You can run all BLAST benchmarks by simply typing

build/bin/bench-blast

You can select benchmarks for specific functions using --benchmark_filter=<regex>.

There are a few targets in the root Makefile that run benchmarks and record results in JSON files. The following command runs and records dgemm benchmarks:

make dgemm-benchmarks

There are also a few make targets for performance plots:

make bench_result/image/dgemm_performance.png bench_result/image/dgemm_performance_ratio.png

You are welcome to contribute by organizing the existing benchmark, writing more benchmarks, and writing scripts to visualize the results.

Making benchmarks give more consistent results

So far, we haven’t been able to make the benchmarks give always the same results on the same processor. However, what we tried so far is :

• isolating CPU 11 by adding ‘nohz_full=5,11 isolcpus=domain,managed_irq,5,11 irqaffinity=0-4,6-10’ to the boot parameters (see https://manuel.bernhardt.io/posts/2023-11-16-core-pinning/)
• using taskset -c 11 to then run the benchmark only on that core
• use performance governor (see https://google.github.io/benchmark/reducing_variance.html)
• turn off Intel Boost (see https://llvm.org/docs/Benchmarking.html)
• use benchmark repetitions, random interleaving, warmup time (these are options of Google benchmark)

Docker image

To automate building and running benchmarks, a Dockerfile is provided. Use the following commands to build a Docker image and run benchmarks in a Docker container:

cd blast
docker build . --tag blast_bench .
docker run -v `pwd`/bench_result/docker:/root/blast/bench_result blast_bench

The benchmark results will be put in /bench_result/docker.