Benchmarking the Powering Computations for Application Tuning

Powering is an important operation in many computation intensive workloads. This paper investigates the performance of different styles to calculate the powering operations from the application level. A series of small benchmark codes that calculate the powering operations in different ways are designed. Their performance is evaluated on Intel Xeon CPU under Intel compilation environments. The results show that the number of floating-point operations and the related runtime are sensitive to the value of the exponent Y and how it is used. When Y is an immediate integer number whose value is known at compile time, the cost of powering is much less than the situation when Y is an integer variable whose value is known at runtime. When Y is defined as a real variable, the cost of powering is always high, be it equals to an integer number or not. Based on the investigations, performance optimizations are applied to a kernel subroutine from a real-world supersonic combustion simulation code, which intensively involves powering operations. The result shows that the performance of that subroutine is improved for 13.25 times on the Intel Xeon E5-2692 CPU.