RAPTOR: Practical Numerical Profiling of Scientific Applications

Abstract: The proliferation of low-precision units in modern high-performance architectures increasingly burdens domain scientists. Historically, the choice in HPC was easy: can we get away with 32 bit floating-point operations and lower bandwidth requirements, or is FP64 necessary? Driven by Artificial Intelligence, vendors introduced novel low-precision units for vector and tensor operations, and FP64 capabilities stagnate or are reduced. This is forcing scientists to re-evaluate their codes, but a trivial search-and-replace approach to go from FP64 to FP16 will not suffice. We introduce RAPTOR: a numerical profiling tool to guide scientists in their search for code regions where precision lowering is feasible. Using LLVM, we transparently replace high-precision computations using low-precision units, or emulate a user-defined precision. RAPTOR is a novel, feature-rich approach -- with focus on ease of use -- to change, profile, and reason about numerical requirements and instabilities, which we demonstrate with four real-world multi-physics Flash-X applications.