Question

I’m currently developing a C-module for a Java-application that needs some performance improvements (see Improving performance of network coding-encoding for a background). I’ve tried to optimize the code using SSE-intrinsics and it executes somewhat faster than the Java-version (~20%). However, it’s still not fast enough.

Unfortunately my experience with optimizing C-code is somewhat limited. I therefore would love to get some ideas on how to improve the current implementation.

The inner loop that constitutes the hot-spot looks like this:

for (i = 0; i < numberOfGFVectorsInFragment; i++)   {

        // Load the 4 GF-elements from the message-fragment and add the log of the coefficeint to them.
        __m128i currentMessageFragmentVector = _mm_load_si128 (currentMessageFragmentPtr);
        __m128i currentEncodedResult = _mm_load_si128(encodedFragmentResultArray);

        __m128i logSumVector = _mm_add_epi32(coefficientLogValueVector, currentMessageFragmentVector);

        __m128i updatedResultVector = _mm_xor_si128(currentEncodedResult, valuesToXor);
        _mm_store_si128(encodedFragmentResultArray, updatedResultVector);

        encodedFragmentResultArray++;
        currentMessageFragmentPtr++;
    }

Answer 1

Even without looking at the assembly, I can tell right away that the bottleneck is from the 4-element gather memory access and from the _mm_set_epi32 packing operations. Internally, _mm_set_epi32, in your case will probably be implemented as a series of unpacklo/hi instructions.

Most of the “work” in this loop is from packing these 4 memory accesses. In the absence of SSE4.1, I would go so far to say that the loop could be faster non-vectorized, but unrolled.

If you’re willing to use SSE4.1, you can try this. It might be faster, it might not:

    int* logSumArray = (int*)(&logSumVector);

    __m128i valuesToXor = _mm_cvtsi32_si128(expTable[*(logSumArray++)]);
    valuesToXor = _mm_insert_epi32(valuesToXor, expTable[*(logSumArray++)], 1);
    valuesToXor = _mm_insert_epi32(valuesToXor, expTable[*(logSumArray++)], 2);
    valuesToXor = _mm_insert_epi32(valuesToXor, expTable[*(logSumArray++)], 3);

I suggest unrolling the loop at least 4 iterations and interleaving all the instructions to give this code any chance of performing well.

What you really need is Intel’s AVX2 gather/scatter instructions. But that’s a few years down the road…