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I have a program that has a nested loop, together with its parent running at $O(n^2)$ complexity performing floating point arithmetic.

I see that the performance of the code when compiled with icc is comparable to that of g++ -ffast-math.

Does this mean that icc is switching on an equivalent of the -ffast-math implicitly?

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2 Answers 2

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To first order approximation, icc does use -ffast-math by default.

If you run icc --help, it will show you its options. One of the sections is Floating Point, which begins like this:

Floating Point
--------------

-fp-model <name>
          enable <name> floating point model variation
            [no-]except - enable/disable floating point semantics
            fast[=1|2]  - enables more aggressive floating point optimizations
            precise     - allows value-safe optimizations
            source      - enables intermediates in source precision
            strict      - enables -fp-model precise -fp-model except, disables
                          contractions and enables pragma stdc fenv_access
            double      - rounds intermediates in 53-bit (double) precision
            extended    - rounds intermediates in 64-bit (extended) precision

It doesn't say it here, but in icc documentation here, it says that fast=1 is the default.

The other options similar to -ffast-math are:

-[no-]prec-sqrt
          determine if certain square root optimizations are enabled
-[no-]prec-div
          improve precision of FP divides (some speed impact)
-[no-]fast-transcendentals
          generate a faster version of the transcendental functions
...
-[no-]ftz
          enable/disable flush denormal results to zero
-[no-]fma
          enable/disable the combining of floating point multiplies and
          add/subtract operations

E.g., fused multiply-adds are on by default, and precise square root is off by default.

But the correspondence between -ffast-math and -fp-model fast=1 is probably not very precise - it could well be that some other specific options are included in fast-math (which can be seen here) but excluded in fp-model fast=1 or vice versa. It looks to me like among other things -ffast-math would disable non-finite floating-point arithmetic (inf, nan), which icc doesn't do by default.

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  • $\begingroup$ So does icc prioritise speed over accuracy ? $\endgroup$
    – kesari
    Sep 27, 2015 at 20:51
  • $\begingroup$ @kesari Yes, but it is a choice of defaults - it is easy to pick -fp-model that suits you best. Given how common the flag -ffast-math is for gcc projects, I don't think it represents any kind of real difference between the two compilers. $\endgroup$
    – Kirill
    Sep 28, 2015 at 18:12
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You can find out by asking icc and g++ to print out all the optimization switches that are actually enabled. Look at the verbosity options for each.

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  • $\begingroup$ How do I do that ? $\endgroup$
    – kesari
    Sep 24, 2015 at 17:36
  • $\begingroup$ The '-v' option to both seems to give what you need for both compilers. You may have to work backwards from some switches to know if they are implied by a higher-level one. $\endgroup$
    – Bill Barth
    Sep 24, 2015 at 21:46

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