Hello and welcome to my blog!
In this blog post, I will be writing about my final project for SPO600. The goal of this project is to optimize an open-source library. To complete the project, I had to choose one of the following tasks: alter build options, code changes to permit better optimization by the compiler, algorithm improvements or In-line assembler.
What I did to find an Open-source project:
For a long time, I have been working with audio as a hobby. I actively produced music, mix live bands, calibrate PA speakers and play drums. So, after completing the lab about changing the volume of sound, I knew I wanted to work with audio. So, I started at an open-source project that I knew about that works with audio called Audacity. Audacity is an open-source DAW (Digital Audio Workstation.) I looked around the Audacity project source for a bit then decided to dig into its dependencies. I got the idea of looking at the dependencies from my professor. He suggested to everyone that a library would be a great place to find an opportunity to optimize some code. In looking at the Audacity dependencies, I found the library called FLAC by Xiph. FLAC is an acronym that means Free Lossless Audio Codec. Similar to what I did with Audacity, I started looking at the source code. The way I navigated the source code was by using the search on GitHub and the Find command on bash. I was looking for architecture-specific code, so my search’s were like “x86” or “aarch64”. Between searching for keywords and browsing the folders, I found a file that was called “cpu.c” in “src/libFLAC,” and inside, I was able to determine that the FLAC project has not yet been optimized for Aarch64. The way I discovered that the FLAC project has yet to be optimized for Aarch64 was by looking at the compiler preprocessing directives. Inside that file, I could see that this project has optimizations for the x86, IA32 and PPC architectures, but not for Aarch64. After learning that the FLAC project has not been optimized for Aarch64, I submitted an Issue on GitHub. Here is a link to the issue I created: Issue #156. Inside the issue, I inquired to the maintainers of the FLAC project if they were open to me, adding some optimizations for Aarch64. One of the maintainers of the FLAC project responded and is open to me, adding Aarch64 support to the FLAC project. Now that I got approval to work on this repo, I could now start on my benchmarking.
Benchmarking the FLAC project:
Step one to benchmarking the FLAC project was building the projects on both x86 and Aarch64. I downloaded the source code from the FLAC GitHub, so the first step to building the library was to run the “autogen.sh” script. Which created my “./configure” script. I then ran the configure script with the “-pg” command to allow gprof, so my configuration command was “./configure CFLAGS=”-g -pg -O2″ CXXFLAGS=”-g -pg -O2″.” I was then able to use “make -j” to build the code. Unfortunately, I could not get gporf working with the main FLAC binary. It would only send garbage data to the “gprof.out” file. Though I did get gprof working with some of the tests that were included with the source code, so I know the “-pg” worked. I ended up switching to perf for my profiling. I ran Make clean and then re-ran Configure so I could use perf. “./configure CFLAGS=”-g -O2″ CXXFLAGS=”-g -O2″ .” After doing that, I grabbed my test data and ran perf record. The command I used to test with is “src/flac/flac input.wav” this command runs FLAC and passes a wave file to it. For my sizable test data, I took one of the live multitrack recordings that I had on my computer and exported the mix to a stereo wave file. The test wave file is 1 hour and 31 minutes long and is 1.57 gigabytes.
Using Perf:
Perf did a fantastic job of helping me find what I want to optimize for this project. The part of FLAC that I tested was the encoding, specifically “.wav” encoding to “.flac.” I ran the same test file on the two different architectures, and the performance difference was noticeable instantly. On the x86 machine, it will run the encoding in 16.439s. And the Aarch64 machine took 4minutes and 39.585s. (These times are from one of the tests I did. I ran the test multiple times with similar results.) I then took a look at the perf report.
Perf Report:
In analyzing the perf reports, I was able to narrow down where I should target my optimizations. You can see from the following snippets of the perf report that on the Aarch64 architecture, the function called “FLAC__lpc_compute_autocorrelation” is taking about 49.64% of the run time. Versus, on the x86 report it uses an intrinsic version of that function called “FLAC__lpc_compute_autocorrelation_intrin_sse_lag_12_new” which significantly improves the performance. On the x86 machine, this function only took 7.25% of the run time. The vanilla c code in which the Aarch64 machine is running is located inside the file “ipc.c.” The Intrinsic code the x86 machine is running is located inside the file “ipc_intin_sse.c.” These files are located in the “src/libFLAC” folder.
aarch64
# Samples: 1M of event 'cycles:uppp'
# Event count (approx.): 255896905943
#
# Overhead Command Shared Object Symbol
# ........ ....... .................. ............................................................................................
49.64% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] FLAC__lpc_compute_autocorrelation
8.54% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] FLAC__fixed_compute_best_predictor_wide
7.08% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] FLAC__lpc_compute_residual_from_qlp_coefficients_wide
5.65% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] FLAC__bitwriter_write_rice_signed_block
5.19% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] FLAC__lpc_window_data
5.14% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] precompute_partition_info_sums_
4.54% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] FLAC__MD5Transform
x86
# Samples: 61K of event 'cycles:u'
# Event count (approx.): 52656457012
#
# Overhead Command Shared Object Symbol
# ........ ....... .................. ............................................................................................
#
20.02% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] FLAC__fixed_compute_best_predictor_wide_intrin_ssse3
16.78% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] FLAC__bitwriter_write_rice_signed_block
16.44% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] FLAC__MD5Transform
7.43% lt-flac lt-flac [.] format_input
7.25% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] FLAC__lpc_compute_autocorrelation_intrin_sse_lag_12_new
7.17% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] FLAC__lpc_compute_residual_from_qlp_coefficients_wide_intrin_avx2
5.44% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] FLAC__fixed_compute_residual
4.17% lt-flac libFLAC.so.8.3.0 [.] FLAC__MD5Accumulate
Strategy:
In reviewing the benchmarks and the code, I have narrowed down the strategy I will be doing to complete the project. Here is the list of steps I came up with to optimize the encoding of FLAC for aarch64.
- Research the required pre-processor directives that I will need to run the Aarch64 code inside the FLAC library conditionally.
- Test the pre-processor directives with some code that will cause a fault, so I know it is working.
- Examine the codebase to know where precisely I need to put the pre-processor directives. And check if I need to mess with the build instructions.
- Configure the makefile to build the new file that I am adding.
- I am going to focus on the “FLAC__lpc_compute_autocorrelation” function, and I am going to translate it into aarch64 intrinsic’s. I will use the existing c and x86 intrinsic code to help me with the translation.
- Testing my optimization, I will re-run the test that I performed on the original code with my optimized version and see if I have improved the performance on the aarch64 platform.
- As a stretch goal, depending on how hard it is to write the Aarch64 intrinsics, I would like to translate the full “ipc.c” file with aarch64 intrinsics.
Results To This Point:
At this point, I have found a project to work on, started learning the project structure, did research on how to use the package, I successfully built the package on both x86 and Aarch64 and performed benchmarks on the project using gprof, perf and the bash time command on both platforms. For my optimization, I have narrowed down exactly what I am going to work on for the remainder of this project and created a plan for how I will accomplish those changes.