Test suite for probing the numerical behavior of NVIDIA tensor cores
The aim of this test suite is to probe the numerical behavior of the tensor cores that equip some recent NVIDIA graphic cards. The tests in the suite are divided into 4 sections, and show the following features.
A. Support for subnormal numbers
B. Accuracy of the dot products
C. Rounding modes in tensor core computations
D. Features of the accumulator
1) Tensor cores do not implement guard digits (extra bits on the right)
2) Tensor cores do not normalize by shifting right (in sums of elements with same sign)
3) Tensor cores do not normllize by shifting left (in sums of elements with opposite sign)
4) Tensor cores implement two carry-out digits (extra bits on the left)
5) The product of tensor cores is not monotonic
The experiments can be compiled by issuing make all
, which generates several executable files:
test-V100
, for testing Volta GPUs (requires version 9 or newer of the CUDA platform);test-T4
, for testing Turing GPUs (requires version 10 or newer of the CUDA platform);test-A100-binary16
, test-A100-bf16
, test-A100-tf32
, test-A100-binary64
, for testing the four precision configurations available on Ampere GPUs (requires version 11 or newer of the CUDA platform).Details about the code in this repository can be found in:
Massimiliano Fasi, Nicholas J. Higham, Mantas Mikaitis, and Srikara Pranesh. Numerical Behavior of the NVIDIA Tensor Cores. PeerJ Computer Science 7:e330, 2021.
This software is distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL v.2 software license (see LICENSE.md).