Matrix multiplication with goroutine drops performance - go

Question

I am optimizing matrix multiplication via goroutines in Go.
My benchmark shows, introducing concurrency per row or per element largely drops performance:
goos: darwin
goarch: amd64
BenchmarkMatrixDotNaive/A.MultNaive-8 2000000 869 ns/op 0 B/op 0 allocs/op
BenchmarkMatrixDotNaive/A.ParalMultNaivePerRow-8 100000 14467 ns/op 80 B/op 9 allocs/op
BenchmarkMatrixDotNaive/A.ParalMultNaivePerElem-8 20000 77299 ns/op 528 B/op 65 allocs/op
I know some basic prior knowledge of cache locality, it make sense that per element concurrency drops performance. However, why per row still drops the performance even in naive version?
In fact, I also wrote a block/tiling optimization, its vanilla version (without goroutine concurrency) even worse than naive version (not present here, let's focus on naive first).
What did I do wrong here? Why? How to optimize here?
Multiplication:
package naive
import (
"errors"
"sync"
)
// Errors
var (
ErrNumElements = errors.New("Error number of elements")
ErrMatrixSize = errors.New("Error size of matrix")
)
// Matrix is a 2d array
type Matrix struct {
N int
data [][]float64
}
// New a size by size matrix
func New(size int) func(...float64) (*Matrix, error) {
wg := sync.WaitGroup{}
d := make([][]float64, size)
for i := range d {
wg.Add(1)
go func(i int) {
defer wg.Done()
d[i] = make([]float64, size)
}(i)
}
wg.Wait()
m := &Matrix{N: size, data: d}
return func(es ...float64) (*Matrix, error) {
if len(es) != size*size {
return nil, ErrNumElements
}
for i := range es {
wg.Add(1)
go func(i int) {
defer wg.Done()
m.data[i/size][i%size] = es[i]
}(i)
}
wg.Wait()
return m, nil
}
}
// At access element (i, j)
func (A *Matrix) At(i, j int) float64 {
return A.data[i][j]
}
// Set set element (i, j) with val
func (A *Matrix) Set(i, j int, val float64) {
A.data[i][j] = val
}
// MultNaive matrix multiplication O(n^3)
func (A *Matrix) MultNaive(B, C *Matrix) (err error) {
var (
i, j, k int
sum float64
N = A.N
)
if N != B.N || N != C.N {
return ErrMatrixSize
}
for i = 0; i < N; i++ {
for j = 0; j < N; j++ {
sum = 0.0
for k = 0; k < N; k++ {
sum += A.At(i, k) * B.At(k, j)
}
C.Set(i, j, sum)
}
}
return
}
// ParalMultNaivePerRow matrix multiplication O(n^3) in concurrency per row
func (A *Matrix) ParalMultNaivePerRow(B, C *Matrix) (err error) {
var N = A.N
if N != B.N || N != C.N {
return ErrMatrixSize
}
wg := sync.WaitGroup{}
for i := 0; i < N; i++ {
wg.Add(1)
go func(i int) {
defer wg.Done()
for j := 0; j < N; j++ {
sum := 0.0
for k := 0; k < N; k++ {
sum += A.At(i, k) * B.At(k, j)
}
C.Set(i, j, sum)
}
}(i)
}
wg.Wait()
return
}
// ParalMultNaivePerElem matrix multiplication O(n^3) in concurrency per element
func (A *Matrix) ParalMultNaivePerElem(B, C *Matrix) (err error) {
var N = A.N
if N != B.N || N != C.N {
return ErrMatrixSize
}
wg := sync.WaitGroup{}
for i := 0; i < N; i++ {
for j := 0; j < N; j++ {
wg.Add(1)
go func(i, j int) {
defer wg.Done()
sum := 0.0
for k := 0; k < N; k++ {
sum += A.At(i, k) * B.At(k, j)
}
C.Set(i, j, sum)
}(i, j)
}
}
wg.Wait()
return
}
Benchmark:
package naive
import (
"os"
"runtime/trace"
"testing"
)
type Dot func(B, C *Matrix) error
var (
A = &Matrix{
N: 8,
data: [][]float64{
[]float64{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8},
[]float64{9, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7},
[]float64{8, 9, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6},
[]float64{7, 8, 9, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5},
[]float64{6, 7, 8, 9, 1, 2, 3, 4},
[]float64{5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 1, 2, 3},
[]float64{4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 1, 2},
[]float64{3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0},
},
}
B = &Matrix{
N: 8,
data: [][]float64{
[]float64{9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2},
[]float64{1, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3},
[]float64{2, 1, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4},
[]float64{3, 2, 1, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5},
[]float64{4, 3, 2, 1, 9, 8, 7, 6},
[]float64{5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 9, 8, 7},
[]float64{6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 9, 8},
[]float64{7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0},
},
}
C = &Matrix{
N: 8,
data: [][]float64{
[]float64{0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0},
[]float64{0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0},
[]float64{0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0},
[]float64{0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0},
[]float64{0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0},
[]float64{0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0},
[]float64{0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0},
[]float64{0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0},
},
}
)
func BenchmarkMatrixDotNaive(b *testing.B) {
f, _ := os.Create("bench.trace")
defer f.Close()
trace.Start(f)
defer trace.Stop()
tests := []struct {
name string
f Dot
}{
{
name: "A.MultNaive",
f: A.MultNaive,
},
{
name: "A.ParalMultNaivePerRow",
f: A.ParalMultNaivePerRow,
},
{
name: "A.ParalMultNaivePerElem",
f: A.ParalMultNaivePerElem,
},
}
for _, tt := range tests {
b.Run(tt.name, func(b *testing.B) {
for i := 0; i < b.N; i++ {
tt.f(B, C)
}
})
}
}

Answer 1

Performing 8x8 matrix multipliciation is relatively small work.
Goroutines (although may be lightweight) do have overhead. If the work they do is "small", the overhead of launching, synchronizing and throwing them away may outweight the performance gain of utilizing multiple cores / threads, and overall you might not gain performance by executing such small tasks concurrently (hell, you may even do worse than without using goroutines). Measure.
If we increase the matrix size to 80x80, running the benchmark we already see some performance gain in case of ParalMultNaivePerRow:
BenchmarkMatrixDotNaive/A.MultNaive-4 2000 1054775 ns/op
BenchmarkMatrixDotNaive/A.ParalMultNaivePerRow-4 2000 709367 ns/op
BenchmarkMatrixDotNaive/A.ParalMultNaivePerElem-4 100 10224927 ns/op
(As you see in the results, I have 4 CPU cores, running it on your 8-core machine might show more performance gain.)
When rows are small, you are using goroutines to do minimal work, you may improve performance by not "throwing" away goroutines once they're done with their "tiny" work, but you may "reuse" them. See related question: Is this an idiomatic worker thread pool in Go?
Also see related / possible duplicate: Vectorise a function taking advantage of concurrency