A recent Q&A on Stackoverflow on fast implementations of atanf()
prompted me to take a look at the implementation provided by CUDA 11. Without any fancy algorithms, simply by focusing on the use of MUFU.RCP
and tuning the coefficients of the core approximation accordingly, I was able to reduce maximum error from 2.05199 ulps in CUDA 11 to 1.32278 ulps in my own implementation, which means that my_atanf()
never differs by more than 1 ulp from a correctly-rounded single-precision result. As for performance, I observe a speedup between 6% and 13% on a Turing-class GPU (Quadro RTX 4000) depending on argument magnitude.
[Code below updated 1/15/2023, 2/19/2023]
/*
Copyright (c) 2022-2023, Norbert Juffa
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*/
/* Core approximation for arctangent. Approximate atan(a) on [-1,1] */
__forceinline__ __device__ float atanf_poly (float a)
{
float r, s, t;
s = a * a;
r = 2.74944305e-3f; // 0x1.686000p-9
r = fmaf (r, s, -1.57383122e-2f); // -0x1.01db44p-6
r = fmaf (r, s, 4.23044525e-2f); // 0x1.5a8edep-5
r = fmaf (r, s, -7.48807490e-2f); // -0x1.32b628p-4
r = fmaf (r, s, 1.06435075e-1f); // 0x1.b3f544p-4
r = fmaf (r, s, -1.42076507e-1f); // -0x1.22f902p-3
r = fmaf (r, s, 1.99936226e-1f); // 0x1.99782ap-3
r = fmaf (r, s, -3.33331466e-1f); // -0x1.5554d8p-2
t = s * a;
r = fmaf (r, t, a);
return r;
}
/* Use MUFU.RCP directly */
__forceinline__ __device__ float rcp_approx_gpu (float divisor)
{
float r;
asm ("rcp.approx.ftz.f32 %0,%1;\n\t" : "=f"(r) : "f"(divisor));
return r;
}
/* Transfer sign of second argument to (positive!) first argument */
__forceinline__ __device__ float copysignf_pos (float a, float b)
{
return __int_as_float((__float_as_int(a) | (__float_as_int(b) & 0x80000000)));
}
/* Compute arctangent with a maximum error of 1.33068 ulps */
__device__ float my_atanf (float a)
{
float r, t;
t = fabsf (a);
r = t;
if (t > 1.0f) {
r = rcp_approx_gpu (r);
}
r = atanf_poly (r);
if (t > 1.0f) {
r = fmaf (0x1.ddcb02p-1f, 0x1.aee9d6p+0f, -r); // pi/2 - r
}
if (t <= INFINITY) {
r = copysignf_pos (r, a);
}
return r;
}