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I'm working on some problems that ultimately boil down into a simple assembly of an overdetermined system of equations, $Ax=b$, where $A$ is $m \times n$ for $m \gg n$. I'm leveraging Armadillo's C++ library, which I'm linking against MKL. I computed my root mean square error on my training data by computing $E = \frac{\|Ax-b\|}{\sqrt{m}}$ and noticed that my errors and solution $x$ varied significantly per run of the test (in the second or third significant digit, sometimes some coefficients were off by a factor of 2). This troubled me, and so I ran the application with MKL_NUM_THREADS=1 forcing the number of threads down to 1, and every time I ran I got the same answer (with minor, far in the noise differences), and the error $E$ fell by several orders of magnitude.

I solve the linear system using the very simple call arma::solve(X,A,B) where $X$ contains two columns of $n$ coefficients we aim to solve for, and $B$ contains two columns of $m$ data points. The condition number is likely large (forgot to check it), but it is still within what I would guess is the "safe range" (NumPy's linalg.lstsq never complained when I tried it using that).

I'm guessing this is an error somewhere in my matrix assembly, or maybe something I'm fundamentally misunderstanding about multi-threaded MKL being used by armadillo. Is this an expected behavior or a sign that there is definitely something wrong in the code?

Thanks for any suggestions!

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Parallel code implies a different order of summation for your matrix and any other floating point operations within the solver. It's entirely possible that the matrix and solution you get are especially harmed by this if the condition number is really bad.

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